Nemesis

wooden box on the bed, and that was when she had her answer.

54

The other woman came into the room striding like a man, and around the back of

her scalp she wore an emitter crown, the delicate filigree of crystalline psybercircuits

and implant tech glowing with soft light. She towered over the diminutive

Iota, nearly two metres tall in elevated boots of shiny blue leather, a full and wellshaped

body showing through a bustier-affair outfit that could only have been a few

strips of hide if taken off and laid end to end. She carried a device that resembled a

bulbous tonfa in one hand, one end of it bladed, the other crackling with energy.

The woman sneered at Iota. The expression was ugly and ill-fitting on her face,

and Iota saw the small twitches of the nerves around her lips and nostrils as the

crown worked on her. “You’re new,” said the woman. The words were slightly

slurred.

Iota nodded, remaining downcast and passive.

“They tell me there’s something odd about you,” she said, reaching for Iota’s

hand. “Different.” The ugly sneer widened. “I do enjoy things that are different.”

Then she knew for certain. There was a small chance it wasn’t going to be him,

but the clade had invested too much time and effort into inserting Iota into the right

place at the right time for a mistake to happen at this late stage. The voice belonged

to the woman, but the words—and the personality animating her at this moment—

belonged to Jun Yae Jun, scion of one of the Nine Families of the Yndenisc Bloc and

warlord-general. He was also, as intelligence had proven, a deceiver who was

disloyal to the Imperial Throne, in violation of the Nikaea Edict, and suspected of

involvement in a counter-secular cult.

“We will play.” Jun made the woman say the words. He was on the other end of

the emitter crown, somewhere nearby, his body in repose while he forced his

consciousness onto the flesh of the proxy. It was a game the warlord-general liked a

great deal, working a meat-puppet in order to slake his desires. Iota was aware that

many of her guardians back at her clade’s holdfast viewed what Jun did with disgust,

but she only felt a vague curiosity about him, the same clinical detachment that

coloured almost all her interactions with other humans.

Iota wondered if the woman Jun controlled was conscious during the activities,

and dispassionately considered the psychological effects that might have; but such

thoughts were trivia. She had a murder to focus on. “Wait,” she said. “I have

something for you,” Iota nodded at the box. “A gift.”

“Give it to me,” came the demand.

Iota let the shift dress fall from her shoulders, and with Jun’s second-hand gaze

all over her, she picked up the box and brought it closer. Bloodlock sensors released

the latches and she presented it, holding it up with one hand like a server offering a

tray of food. The killing hand went to the tore and unfastened it.

“What is this?” A clumsy echo of Jun’s confusion crossed the woman’s face. “A

mask?”

The lume light fell over the shape of a metallic skull. One eye was a glittering

ruby, but the other was a cluster of lenses made from milky sapphire, spiked with

stubby vanes and strange antennae. “Of a sort,” Iota explained.

The tore released with a delicate click and Iota felt a sudden rush of cold move

through her, as if a floodgate inside her had opened. At least for the moment, she no

longer needed to hold it all in, to keep the emptiness inside her bottled up.

55

Jun made a strange noise through the woman that was half-cry, half-yelp, and

then the psychoactive matrix of the crown began to fizz and pop, the tonfa falling

from the proxy’s nerveless fingers. With a disordered, tinkling peal, the psionic

crystals in the headdress began to shatter and the woman tottered on her spiked heels,

stumbling over herself to fall upon the bed. She made moaning, weeping sounds.

Iota cocked her head to listen; the same chorus of wailing was coming from room

after room down the corridor of the change-brothel, as the nulling effect of her raw

self spread out.

Before the link could fully die, she sprang onto the bed and brought her face to

the anguished woman’s, staring into her eyes. “I want to kiss you,” she told Jun.

Through the window, across the companionway from the brothel building, the

doors of a nondescript residential slum block had broken open and a tide of panicked

figures was spilling onto the street, all of them half-dressed in clothes that marked

them too rich to be locals.

Iota nimbly leapt back to the floor and unfurled the stealthsuit lying beneath the

skull-helm, stepping into it with careless ease. The mask went on last, and it soothed

her as it did so.

The weeping woman coughed out a last, stuttered word as Jun’s hold on her

finally disintegrated. “Cuh. Cuh. Culexus.”

But Iota did not wait to hear it; instead she threw herself through the window in a

crash of glass and wood, spinning towards the other building.