Nemesis

for all their bloody violence and instinct-driven brutality, they were still methodical.

They left no witnesses, nothing but corpses.

Iota waited, rocking on her heels, ready to break into a run the moment he spotted

her again. From what the infocyte had managed to piece together from the base’s

cogitators, it seemed that there had been a catastrophic accident during the retrieval

of the Garantine from one of the deep cold iso-stores beneath the mantle of the

Aktick ice. The cryopod containing the assassin in his dormant state had cracked a

fluid line; the burst conduit sprayed super-chilled methalon across the handlers, flashfreezing

them all in an instant. By the time another team had made it down to the

transfer area, the pod had drained and the Garantine was already awake. Even in his

semi-dormant, unarmed state, they were easily cut down by him.

The clade’s technologians made the fatal mistake of addressing the problem of

the coolant leak first—an easy choice to understand, given that this particular facility

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housed another nine Eversor field operatives down in the iso-stores. Left unchecked,

the Garantine’s brethren would have eventually followed him into wakefulness. But

the time spent stabilising the storage compartments had allowed the Garantine to

fully thaw and begin the business of terminating every living being in the facility.

“Culexus? Where are you?” said Tariel, his voice a hiss in her helmet vox.

“Area eight, tier one, facing west,” she replied. “Waiting.”

“I’ve accessed the main systems library,” he told her, clearly impressed with his

own achievement. “I’m closing the pressure hatches behind him as he moves.”

Iota glanced down at the multi-barrelled combi-needler fixed to her right wrist,

considering it. “He’s not an animal, Vanus. He’ll know if you’re trying to herd him.”

“Just keep him reactive,” came the reply.

She didn’t say any more, because at that moment the Garantine came storming

around the bend in the corridor, his thickset, densely-muscled body rippling with

exertion. Chugs of white vapour puffed into the cold air from behind his metal mask,

and as he moved, Iota saw the places where his bare skin showed and the shapes of

implants beneath. The Garantine was covered from head to toe with daubs of human

blood. He halted, rumbling like an engine, and eyed her with a low chuckle. In one

hand he had a stubber carbine, liquid dripping from the blunt maw of the barrel.

She thought for a fleeting instant about attempting to reason with him, then

dismissed the idea just as quickly. There were rumours that every Eversor had an

abeyance meme encoded into their brains, a nonsense string of words that would lull

them into inaction, or even send them into neuro-death if spoken aloud; but if this

were so, Iota was sure that the rage-killer would have made certain any technologians

in the base who knew the code were no longer able to voice it.

The Garantine pointed the broken gun at her. “You,” he said thickly. “Quick.”

Perhaps it was a threat—a promise that he was going to end her swiftly—or

perhaps it was a compliment on her agility, acknowledging Iota as the first real

challenge he had come across since awakening. It mattered little; in the next second

he was coming at her, charging like an enraged grox.

She fired a blast of glassaic needles at him, describing a seamless back flip to

open the distance between them. The glittering shots clattered across the Eversor’s

torso, burying themselves in the meat of his chest, but the rage-killer only grunted

and batted them away.

Iota spun to a halt in front of a large oval exterior hatchway, as Tariel’s voice

reached her once more. “Is he there?” came the urgent question. “I… I am having

difficulty reading the location of the Garantine…”

She nodded to herself. Among the many implants beneath the flesh of an Eversor

were passive sensing baffles that could confuse the detector heads of many

conventional scanners. “Oh, he’s here,” Iota told him. “He will murder me in less

than one hundred and ten seconds.” The prediction was based on observing the other

kills the Garantine had made.

“Working,” said the infocyte, a new urgency in his words.

“Take your time,” she replied.

The Eversor halted and cocked his head, considering her. Iota took a breath and

drew in on herself. She let the force matrix built into the structure of her stealth-suit

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come alive, allowing it to reach its web of influence beyond the real and into the

etherium of the warp; but the process was slow. Had she been fighting a psyker, she

could have drained them dry in a moment, siphoned off their power for herself. But