Nemesis

It was then Koyne saw the flowers. They had been delivered by courier shortly

before Rei had arrived. The assassin picked at the plants and noted the colour and

number of the petals on the roses. Something like irritation crossed the killer’s noface

and Koyne paused at the vox-comm alcove in the far wall, inputting the correct

sequence of encoding that the flower arrangement signified.

The reply was almost immediate, meaning that there was a ship nearby.

“Koyne?” A male voice, gruff with it.

The Callidus immediately copied the tonality and replied. “You have broken my

silent protocol.”

“We’re here to help you conclude your mission as quickly as possible. You have

new orders.”

“I have no idea who you fools are, or what authority you may think you have. But

you are compromising my operation and getting in my way.” Koyne grimaced. It was

an ugly expression on the grey face. “I don’t require any help from you. Don’t

interrupt me again.” The Callidus cut the channel and turned away. Such behaviour

was totally unprofessional. The clade knew that once committed, an assassin’s cover

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should not be compromised except in the direst of circumstances—and someone’s

impatience was certainly not reason enough.

Koyne sat and concentrated on Gergerra Rei, on his voice, his gait, the full sense

of the man. Skin puckered and moved, thickening. Implants slowly expanded to add

mass and dimension. Moment by moment, the killer changed.

But the task was still incomplete when the three Crusaders crashed in through the

doorway, searching for a target.

Kell glared at the vox pickup before him. “Well. That was discourteous,” he

muttered.

“Arrogance is a noted character trait of many of the Clade Callidus,” Iota offered.

The Garantine looked at Kell from across the Ultio’s cramped bridge. “What are

we supposed to do? Take in a show? Have a little dinner?” The hulking killer

growled in irritation. “Put me down on the station. I’ll bring the slippery changer

freak back here in pieces.”

Before Kell could reply, a sensor telltale on one of the consoles began to blink.

Tariel motioned at the hololiths around his gauntlet and his expression grew grave.

“The ship reads energy weapon discharges close to Koyne’s location.” He looked up,

out past the nose of the ship to where the hull of Saros Station drifted nearby. “The

Callidus may be in trouble.”

“We should assist,” said Iota.

“Koyne didn’t want any help,” Kell replied. “Made that very clear.”

Tariel gestured at his display. “Auspex magno-scan shows multiple mechanoid

units in the area. War robots, Vindicare. If the Callidus becomes trapped—”

Kell held up a hand to silence him. “The Master of Assassins chose this one for

good reason. Let’s consider this escape a test of skill, shall we? We’ll see how good

this Koyne is.”

The Garantine gave a rough snort of amusement.

Koyne made it into the enclosed avenue outside the apartments with only minor

injuries. The Callidus had been able to recover the memory sword from the steel

corpse of the aide, realising far too late that there had to have been a failsafe backup

biocortex inside the machine, one that broadcast an alert to the rest of Rei’s

bodyguard maniple. Koyne did not doubt that other robots were likely vectoring to

this location from the Mech-Lord’s ship, operating on a kill-switch protocol that

activated with the death of their master. The core directive would be simple—seek

and destroy Gergerra Rei’s murderer.

If only there had been more time. If Koyne could have completed the change into

Rei, then it would have been enough to fool the auto-senses of the machines, long

enough to reach the extraction point and exfiltrate. Rei and the actress would have

been found days later, along with all the evidence that Koyne had prepared to set the

scene for a murder-suicide shared by a pair of doomed lovers. It had a neatly

theatrical tone that would have played well to Saros Station’s intelligentsia.

All that was wasted now, though. Koyne limped away, pain burning from a

glancing laser burn in the leg. The Callidus looked like an unfinished model in

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pinkish-grey clay, caught halfway between the neutral self-template and the form of

the Mech-Lord.

There was a cluster of revellers coming the other way, and Koyne made for them,

fixing the nearest with a hard gaze and imagining their identity as the assassin’s own.

The Callidus heard the heavy stomp of the spindly Crusader robots as they scrambled

in pursuit, chattering to one another in machine code.

The small crowd reacted to the new arrival, the merriment of the group dipping

for a moment in collective confusion. Koyne pressed every grain of mental control

into adopting the face of the civilian—or at least something like it—and swung into

the mass of the group.

The robots stood firm and blocked the avenue, guns up, the faceted eyes of their