Nemesis

The ship had three permanent crewmembers, in addition to the growing numbers

of the Execution Force, but none of them were what could be considered wholly

human. As Kell walked towards the stern, he was aware that beneath his feet the

ship’s astropath lay sleeping inside a null chamber, having deliberately shocked itself

into a somnambulant state; similarly, the Ultio’s Navigator, who habitually remained

far back among the systemry of the drive section, had also opted to drop into sensedep

slumber inside a similar contrapsychic chamber. Both of them had expressed

grave displeasure at Iota’s arrival on board, but their requests that she be sequestered

or drugged into stasis were denied. Kell could only guess at how the delicate psionic

senses of the warp navigator and the astro-telepath would be perturbed by the ghostly

negative aura cast by the Culexus; even he, without a taint of the psyker about him,

found it profoundly unsettling to be around the pariah girl for too long. She had

78

agreed to wear her dampener tore for the duration, but even that device could not

block the eerie air that followed Iota wherever she went.

The third member of the Ultio’s crew was the least human of them all. Kell could

still see the strange look of mingled horror and fascination on Tariel’s face as they

had met the starship’s pilot. There was no body to the pilot, not anymore; like the

venerable dreadnoughts of the Adeptus Astartes, a being that had once been a man

many centuries ago was now only a few pieces of flesh interred inside a body of iron

and steel. Somewhere deep inside the block of computational hardware that filled the

rear section of the crew deck, parts of a brain and preserved skeins of nerve ganglia

were all that remained. Now he was the Ultio, and the Ultio was him, the hull his

skin, the fires of the fusion core his beating heart. Kell tried to comprehend what it

might be like to surrender one’s self to the embrace of a machine, but he could not.

He was, on some base level, appalled by the very idea of such a merging; but what he

thought counted for nothing. The pilot, the Navigator, the astropath and all the rest of

them, they were here to serve the interest of the Assassinorum—to do, and not to

question.

He halted outside a hatchway, his boots ringing on the metal-grilled deck.

“Ultio,” he asked the air, “Is the Garantine awake?”

“Confirmed.” The pilot-cyborg’s voice came from a speaker grille above his

head. It had the flat tonality of a synthetic vocoder.

“Open it,” he ordered.

“Complying,” came the reply. “Hazard warning. Increased gravity field ahead.

Do not enter.”

The hatch fell into the deck, and a waft of stale air, reeking of chemical sweat,

wandered into the corridor. Inside, the Eversor sat uncomfortably on the floor, his

breathing laboured. With visible effort, the rage-killer lifted his head and glared at

Kell. “When I get out of here,” he said, forcing the words from his mouth, “I am

going to rip you apart.”

Kell’s lips thinned. He didn’t approach any closer. Although the Garantine was

not tethered to the deck by any chains or fetters, there was no way he could have

come to his feet. The gravitational plates beneath the floor of the Eversor’s

compartment were operating well above their standard setting, confining the assassin

to the floor with the sheer weight of his own flesh. Veins stood out from his bare skin

as his bio-modified physiology worked to keep him alive; an unaugmented human

would have died from collapsed lungs or crushed organs within an hour or so.

The Garantine had been in the room for two days now, enduring a regimen of

antipsychotics and neural restoratives.

Kell studied him. “It must be difficult for you,” he began. “The doubt. The

uncertainty.”

“There’s no hesitation in me,” gasped the Eversor. “Let me up and you’ll see.”

“The mission, I mean.” That got him the smallest flash of hesitation from behind

the Garantine’s skull-face. “To wake without direction… That can’t have been easy

on you.”

“I will kill,” said the Eversor.

“Yes,” agreed the Vindicare. “And kill and kill and kill, until you are destroyed.

But it will be for nothing. Worthless.”

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With an agonised grunt, the Garantine tried to lurch forward, clawing towards the

open doorway. “I’ll kill you,” he grated. “Worth something.”

Kell resisted the reflex to step back. “You think so?”

“Broke your gun, back there,” muttered the Eversor, the sweat thick on his bare

neck. “Pity. Were you… attached to it?”

Kell didn’t rise to the bait; his prized longrifle had been custom-made by Isherite

weaponsmiths, and it had served him well for years. “It was just a weapon.”

“Like me?”

He spread his hands. “Like all of us.” Kell paused, then went on. “The accident

that woke you early… The Vanus Tariel tells me that it would take too long to put