Nemesis

Daig’s direction. “How did you find me? I hid well enough so even he couldn’t know

where I was!”

Yosef wondered who he might be as Daig answered. “Don’t be afraid. If you are

innocent, we will prove it.”

“Will you?” The question was weak and fearful, like the words of a child.

Then Daig said something that seemed out of place in the moment, and yet the

words were like a calmative, immediately easing the tension in Sigg’s taut frame.

Daig said, “The Emperor protects.”

When Yosef looked back to Sigg, the man was staring directly at him. “I’ve done

many things I’m not proud of,” he told him. “But no longer. And not those things the

wire accuses me of. I’ve never taken a man’s life.”

“I believe you, Erno,” said Yosef, the words leaving his mouth before he was

even aware of them forming in his thoughts; and the strangeness of it was, he did

believe him, with a totality that surprised the reeve with its strength. On some

instinctual level, he knew that Erno Sigg was telling the truth. The fact that Yosef

could not fathom where this abrupt conviction had come from troubled him deeply;

but he did not have time to dwell upon it.

The roof of the cooper’s shack was a shell of corrugated metal and glass, some of

it warped or shattered by the passage of the old inferno. From nowhere, as the dawn

wind changed direction, the musty air was suddenly full of noise. Yosef recognised

the rattling hum of coleopter rotors a split-second before harsh sodium light drenched

the floor with white, the glare from spotlamps blazing down through the smoke-dirty

glass and the holes in the roof. An amplified voice echoed Yosef’s original challenge

to Sigg, and then there was movement.

The reeve looked up, shielding his eyes, and made out the blurs of jagers

dropping from the hovering flyers, heavy guns in their grips at they fell on descender

lines.

He looked back and saw pure fury on Sigg’s face. “Bastards!” he spat

venomously, “I would have come! But you lied! You lied!”

Daig was reaching out to him. “No, wait!” he cried out. “I didn’t bring them! We

came alone—”

Sigg cursed them once again and threw the fuel-lamp in his hand with a savage

jerk. The lantern hit the ground and split in a crash of glass and fire, even as overhead

the intact portions of the roof were breached by the jagers. As pieces of the roof

rained down from above, the lamp’s burning oils kissed the soiled matter and old

spills on the floor and a pulse of smoky flame erupted. Yosef pushed Daig aside as

the new blaze rolled out, chewing on the piles of rotting wood and discarded sacks all

around them.

Daig tried to go after Sigg, but the fire had already built a wall between them, and

the droning throb of the coleopter blades fed it, raising it high. Sigg vanished into the

heat and the smoke.

76

The jagers were disentangling themselves from their ropes as Yosef stormed over

to them; one was already on the wireless for a firefighter unit. The reeve saw Skelta’s

face among the men and grabbed him by his collar.

“Who ordered you in?” he shouted, over the sound of the rotors. “Who’s the shit

who ruined this?” But he knew the answer before he heard it.

77

SIX

Ultio

Lies and Murder

The Death of Kings and Queens

The Officio presented the ship to them without ceremony. Like those it served, the

vessel had a fluid identity; at the present moment, as it made its way towards the

orbit of Jupiter, its pennants and beacons declared it to be the Hallis Faye, an oxygen

tanker out of Ceres registered to a Belter Coalition habitat. Its codename, revealed to

Kell and the others as they boarded, was Ultio.

Outwardly, the Ultio resembled the class of light bulk transport ships that

travelled a thousand different sub-light intrasystem space lanes across the Imperium.

It was a design so commonplace that it became almost invisible in its ubiquity; a

perfect blind for a craft in service to the Officio Assassinorum. Small by the

standards of the mammoth starcruisers that comprised the fleets of the Imperial Navy

and the rogue trader baronage, the Ultio was every inch a lie. A stubby trident, the

shaft of the main hull—what appeared to be space for cargo—was in fact filled with

the mechanisms and power train for an advanced design of interstellar warp motor.

The craft had been constructed around the old engine, the origins of which were lost

to time, and it was only the forward arrowhead-shaped section of the ship that was

actually given over to cabins and compartments. This module, swept back and curved

like an aerodyne, was capable of detaching itself from the massive drives to make

planetfall like a guncutter. Inside, the crew sections of the Ultio were cramped and

narrow, with sleeping quarters no larger than prison cells, hexagonal corridors and a

flight deck configured with advanced gravity simulators so that every square

centimetre of surface area could be utilised.