Nemesis

featureless and undisturbed by madness, lust or naked fury. It was almost inert,

moving under the guidance of an unshakable certainty. It reminded her for one

fleeting instant of Hyssos’ ordered mindset; the killer shared the same dogged,

unflinching sense of direction towards its goals… almost as if it were following a

string of commands.

And still it let her in. She knew if she refused it, Spear would tear her open then

and there. She tried desperately to break past the miasma of cold that lay around her,

projecting as best she could a panicked summons towards her absent guardian; but as

she did this, she also let her mind fall into Spear, stalling for time, on some level

repulsed and fascinated by the monster’s true nature.

Spear was not coy; it opened itself to her. What she saw in there sickened her

beyond her capacity to express. The killer had been made this way, taken from some

human stock now so corrupted that its origin could not be determined, sheathed with

a skein of living materials that seemed cut from the screaming depths of the warp

itself. Perhaps a fluke of cruel nature, or perhaps a thing created by twisted genius,

Spear was soulless, but unlike any stripe of psionic null Perrig had ever encountered.

It was a Black Pariah; the ultimate expression of negative psychic force. Perrig

had believed such things were only conjecture, the mad nightmare creations of wild

theorists and sorcerous madmen—yet here it stood, watching her, breathing the same

air as she wept blood before it.

And then Spear reached out with fingers made of knives and took Perrig’s hand.

She howled as burning pain lanced through her nerves; the killer severed her right

thumb with insolent ease and drew it up and away, toying with its prize. Perrig

gripped her injured hand, vitae gushing from the wound.

Spear took the severed flesh and rolled it into its fanged maw, crunching down

the bone and meat as if it were a rare delicacy. Perrig sank back to the bloodspattered

floor, her head swimming as she caught the edges of the sudden psionic

shift running through the killer.

The black voids of its eyes glared down at her and they became smoky mirrors. In

them she saw her own mind reflected back at her, the power of her own psionic

talents bubbling and rippling, copied and enhanced a thousandfold. Spear had tasted

her blood, the living gene-code of her being—and now it knew her. It had her

imprint.

She scrambled backwards, feeling the humming chorus of her mind and that of

the killer coming into shuddering synchrony, the orbits of their powers moving

towards alignment. Perrig cried out and begged it to stop, but Spear only cocked its

head and let the power build.

It had not killed in this manner for a long time, she realised. The other deaths had

been mundane and unremarkable. It wanted to do this just to be sure it was still

capable, as a soldier might release a clip of ammunition to test the accuracy of a

107

firearm. Belatedly Perrig understood that she was the only thing for light years

around that could have been any kind of threat to it; but now, too late.

And then, they met in the non-space between them. Beyond her ability to stop it,

Perrig’s psionic ability unchained itself and thundered against Spear’s waiting, open

arms. The killer took it all in, every last morsel, and did so with the ease of breathing.

In stillness, Spear released its burden and reflected back all that Perrig was, the

force of her preternatural power returning, magnified into a silent, furious hurricane.

The woman became ashes and broke apart.

Through the coruscating, unquenchable fires of the immaterium, the Ultio raced on,

passing through the corridors of the warp and onwards beyond the borders of the

Segmentum Solar. The ship’s sight-blind Navigator took it through the routes that

were little known, the barely-charted passages that the upper echelons of the Imperial

government kept off the maps given to the common admiralty. These were swift

routes but treacherous ones, causeways through the atemporal realm that larger ships

would never have been able to take, the soul-light glitter of their massive crews

bright enough that they would attract the living storms that wheeled and turned, while

Ultio passed by unnoticed. The phantom-ship was barely there; its Geller fields had

such finely-tuned opacity and it engines such speed that the lumbering, predatory

intelligences that existed inside warp space noted it only by the wake it left behind.

As days turned and clocks spun back on Terra, Ultio flew towards Dagonet; by some

reckonings, it was already there.

On board, the Execution Force gathered once more, this time in a compartment

off the spinal corridor that ran the length of the starship’s massive drives.

Kell watched, as he always did.

The Garantine was still toying with his makeshift blade. He had continued to craft

it into a wicked shiv that was easily the length of a man’s forearm. “What do you

want, Vanus?” he asked.