Nemesis

He thought on this as he rubbed his thumb over the smoothed gold of the aquila

talisman about his wrist.

On the table, there was an elderly holographic projector that flickered and

hummed; a blue-tinted image of Terra floated above it, a time-lapse loop of the

planet’s day-night cycle. At the side of the projector was a book, open at a page of

dense text. The book was made of common-quality vinepaper and it had been bound

without a cover; Daig understood that a friend of Noust’s who worked the nightshirt

at an inkworks had used cast-offs from other jobs and downtime between the print

runs of paying customers to run out multiple copies of the document.

The pages were careworn from many sets of hands upon them, and he wanted to

pick them up and leaf through them, draw comfort from the writings. Daig knew that

he only had to ask, and Noust would give him a copy of his own to keep, but to have

the book in his home, somewhere it could be discovered by mistake or worse, used to

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incriminate him by people who didn’t understand the true meaning contained in it…

He couldn’t take the risk.

Noust was at his side. “You timed it well. We were just about to have a reading.

You’ll join us, yes?”

Daig looked up. There were only a few other people in the cellar, some of whom

he knew, others not so familiar. He spotted a new face and recognised him as a jager

from the precinct; the man returned a wary look, but Daig gave him a nod that

communicated a shared confidence. “Of course,” he said to Noust.

A youth with a bandaged hand picked up the book and handed it to Daig’s friend.

On the front was the only element of adornment on the otherwise Spartan document.

Picked out in red ink, the words Lectitio Divinitatus.

If the Garantine had once possessed a true name, that time was long ago and of little

consequence. The entire concept of a past and a future, these were strange abstracted

notions to the Eversor. They were things that—if he had been able to stop to dwell on

them—would have only brought tics of confusion; and as with all things about him,

rage.

The Eversor existed only in a permanent state of the furious now and matters of

before and after were limited to the most transitory of elements. Before, just

heartbeats earlier, he had beheaded a guard attempting to down him with some kind

of heavy webber cannon. In a moment more, he would leap the distance across the

open space where the handling gantry for the flyers did not reach, in order to land

among the group of technicians who were fleeing towards a doorway. In these small

ways, the Garantine allowed himself to comprehend the nature of past and future, but

to go beyond that was pointless.

It was the manner of his life that he existed in the thick of the killing. He had a

dim understanding of the other times, the times when he would lie in the baths of

amnio-fluids as the patient machines of his clade healed his wounds or upgraded the

stimjectors and drag glands throughout his body. The times when, in the dreamless

no-sleep between missions, hypnogoge data streams would unfold in his head like

blossoms of information, target profiles linked to mood-triggers that would give him

bursts of elation for every kill, jolts of pleasure for each waypoint reached, jerks of

pain if he deviated off-programme.

These things had not happened here, though. He reflected on that as he completed

his leap, his augmented muscles relaxing to take the impact of landing, the sheer

force of his arrival killing one of the fleeing technicians immediately. As he spun

about, the knife-claws on his hands and feet opening veins, the grinning rictus of his

steel skull-mask steaming with splashes of blood, he searched for a programme, for a

set of victory conditions.

There was none. Digging deeper, he reached for his stunted past. He remembered

back as far as he could—an hour, perhaps? He replayed the moment. A sudden

awakening. The transit cocoon that held him in its silent, womb-like space, where he

could wait out the non-time until his next glorious release; suddenly broken. An

error, or something else? Enemy action? That assumption was the Garantine’s default

setting, after all. He reasoned—as much as he was able—that surely if he had been

awakened for any other reason, the hypnogoges would have ensured he knew why.

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But there was nothing. No parameters, only wakefulness. And for an Eversor, to

be awake was to be in the glory of killing. A cocktail of stimulants and battle drugs

boiled through his bloodstream, heavy doses of Fury, Spur and Psychon synthesised

to order by the compact biofac implants in his abdomen. Under normal

circumstances, the Garantine would have been armed with more than just his

skinplanted offensive weapons and helm-mask; he would have been sheathed in

armour and arrayed with a suite of servo-systems. That he did not have these only

served to modify the killer’s approach to his targets. He had taken and employed