Nemesis

Yosef’s heart sank. “So the Consortium know.”

“It’s worse than that, actually,” she told him. “They’ve reclaimed the aeronef

directly from evidentiary after using some pull with the Landgrave.”

“They can’t do that…” said Daig, with a grimace.

“It’s already done,” Tisely went on. “And there are Consortium clinicians on the

way to take custody of the luckless Cirsun here.” She tapped the mist-wreathed tube.

“They’re probably caught in that cursed traffic, otherwise they’d have been here

already and removed him.”

Yosef’s eyes narrowed. “This is a Sentine matter. It’s an Iestan matter.” His

annoyance burned cold and slow as he remembered Telemach’s words in the

precinct; and yet a day later her superior was sweeping all that aside in favour of

doing everything possible to appease the Consortium; because Iesta Veracrux

supplied wines to the entire Ultima Segmentum, and without Eurotas, the planet’s

economy would die on the vine.

Daig finally swore under his breath, earning him a censorious glare from Tisely.

“It doesn’t stop there,” she went on, as if to chastise him. “Latigue’s seniors sent an

astropathic communiquй to the Void Baron himself. He’s apparently taking a

personal interest in the incident.”

Yosef felt the colour drain from his face. “Eurotas… He’s coming here?”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Tisely told him. “In fact, I hear a whisper that some of his

personal agents are already in the warp, on their way.”

In spite of himself, that queasy feeling returned to Yosef’s gut and he took a

breath of the chilled, antiseptic air. With a sudden jolt of anger, he snatched the dataslate

from Daig’s hand and glared at it. “This isn’t an investigation anymore, it’s a

bloody poison chalice.”

* * *

Valdor snapped back to awareness with a jerk, and he stifled a reflexive cough. He

felt a heavy weight across his torso and thick drifts of sandy matter all around him.

There was heat, too, close and intense, searing his skin. He tasted the stink of burning

fuel on his lips.

Checking himself, the Custodian found nothing more serious than a minor

dislocation among the contusions he had suffered in the crash. With care, he rotated

his forearm back into its socket and tested it, the flash of pain ebbing. Valdor placed

43

both hands against the weight holding him down—a section of hull plate, he noted—

and forced it up and away.

He came to his feet surrounded by flames and grey smoke. Valdor remembered

the moment of the impact only in fleeting impressions; sparks of pain and the

spinning of the cargo bay all around him as the wounded flyer slammed into the sand.

He had heard Tariel cry out; there was no sign of the infocyte nearby. Valdor moved

forward, picking his way over steaming mounds of wreckage, heated by the blazing

slick of liquid promethium that had spilled out across the landscape. Sections of the

transport lay in a line that vanished off across the ruddy plains, surrounding a black

trail carved in the dirt by the craft as it had skidded to a halt, losing pieces of itself

along the way.

He saw something that looked familiar; the cockpit pod, the egg-shape of it stove

in and crumpled. Blood painted the canopy from the inside, and Valdor knew that the

pilot would not have survived the landing. He turned this way and that. The

encroaching flames were high and swift, and he had little room to manoeuvre.

Sweeping around, he found what seemed to be the thinnest part in the wall of fire and

ran at it, his legs pumping. At the last possible second, Valdor leapt into the flames

and punched through, the sandcloak around him catching alight.

He landed hard on the other side of the wreckage and came up in a crouch.

Snatching at the cloak, he tore it from himself as the fire took hold and threw it as

hard as he could. Panting, Valdor looked up; and it was then he realised he was not

alone.

“Well,” said a rough voice, “what have we got here?”

He counted eight of them. They wore the patchwork gear of a junkhunter gang,

armour cobbled together from a dozen disparate sources, faces hidden behind breath

filters and hoods. All of them were armed with large-gauge weapons— different

varieties of stubber guns mostly, but he also spied a couple with twin-barrelled laser

carbines, and one with the distinctive shape of a plasma gun held at the ready. Their

collection of vehicles was as motley as everything else, a pair of four-legged walker

platforms along with fast duneriders on fat knobbled tires, and a single ground-effect

track.

Valdor considered them with the cold tactical precision of a trained warrior. Only

eight, eight humans, some of them likely to have reflex enhancements, perhaps even

dermal plating, but still only eight. He knew with complete certainty that he would be

able to kill them all in less than sixty seconds, and that was if he took his time about

it.

There were only two things that gave him a moment’s pause. The first was the