Nemesis

with the thought of machines that could do a man’s job better.

Hyssos nodded at one of the engines. “I’ve been granted use of this module.

Various information sources from Iesta Veracrux’s watch-wire are being collated and

sifted by it.”

“You can do that from up here?” Yosef felt an odd stab of concern he couldn’t

place.

The operative nodded. “The uptake of data is very slow due to the incompatibility

of the systems, but we have some level of parity. Enough to check the capital’s traffic

patterns, compare information on the suspect with the movements of his known

associates, and so on.”

“We have jagers on the ground doing that,” Daig insisted. “Human eyes and ears

are always the best source of facts.”

Hyssos nodded. “I quite agree. But these machines can help us to narrow our

fields of inquiry. They can do in hours what would take your office and your jagers

weeks to accomplish.” Daig didn’t respond, but Yosef could see he was unconvinced.

“We’ll tighten the noose,” continued the operative. “Sigg won’t slip the net a second

time, mark my words.”

Yosef shot him a look, searching the comment for any accusation—and he found

none. Still, he was troubled, and he had to voice it. “Assuming Sigg is our killer.” He

remembered the man’s face in the cooper’s shack, the certainty he had felt when he

read Erno Sigg’s fear and desperation. He looked like a victim.

Hyssos was watching him. “Do you have something to add, Reeve Sabrat?”

“No.” He looked away and found Daig, his cohort’s expression unreadable. It

wasn’t just Sigg he was having his doubts about; Yosef thought back to what the

other man had said in the ruined lodge, and the recent changes in his manner. Daig

was keeping something from him, but he could not think of a way to draw it out.

“No,” he repeated. “Not now.”

What the others called the “staging area” was really little more than a converted

storage bay, and Iota saw little reason why the name of it made so much difference.

The Ultio was a strange vessel; she was still trying to know it, and it wasn’t letting

her. The ship was one thing pretending to be another, an assemblage of rare

technologies and secrets that had been stitched into a single body; given a mission,

thrown out into the darkness. It was like her in that way, she mused. They could

almost have been kin.

99

The mind inside the ship spoke to her when she spoke to it, answering some of

her questions but not others. Eventually, Iota became bored with the circular

conversations and tried to find another way to amuse herself. As a test of her stealth

skills, she took to exploring the smallest of the crawlspaces aboard the Ultio or

spying on the medicae compartment where the Callidus was recovering inside a

therapy pod. When she wasn’t doing this or meditating, Iota spent the time hunting

down spiders in shadowed corners of the hull, catching and collecting them in a jar

she had appropriated from the ship’s mess. So far, her hopes of encouraging the

arachnids to form their own rudimentary society had failed.

She spotted another of the insects in the lee of a console and deftly snared it;

then, with a cruelty born of her boredom, she severed its legs one by one, to see if it

could still walk without them.

Kell entered the chamber; he was the last to arrive. The infocyte Tariel had been

working at the hololith projector and he seemed uncharacteristically muted. The

Vanus’ mood had been like this ever since he and the Vindicare had returned from

Terra with the last of the recruits, the woman who called herself Soalm. The new

arrival didn’t speak much either. She seemed rather delicate for an assassin; that was

something that many thought of Iota when they first laid eyes on her, but the chill of

her preternatural aura was usually enough to destroy that illusion within a heartbeat.

The Garantine’s bulk took up a corner of the room, like an angry canine daring any

one of them to crowd into his space. He was playing with a sliver of sharpened

metal—the remains of a tool, she believed—dancing the makeshift blade across his

thick fingers with a striking degree of dexterity. He was bored too, but annoyed with

it; then again, Iota had come to understand that every mood of the Eversor was some

shade of anger, to a greater or lesser extent. Koyne sat in a wire-frame chair, the

Callidus’ smoothed-flat features like an unfinished carving in soapstone. She

watched the shade for a few moments, and Koyne offered Iota a brief smile. The

Callidus’ skin darkened, taking on a tone close to the tawny shade of Iota’s own

flesh; but then the moment was broken by Kell as he rapped his gloved hand on the

support beams of the low ceiling.

“We’re all here,” said the Vindicare. His gaze swept the room, dwelling briefly

on all of them; all of them except Soalm, she noted. “The mission begins now.”

“Where are we going?” asked Koyne, in a voice like Iota’s.