James Swallow - Nemesis

by the fangs and spines. It thundered across the debris, crashing through the water.

Kell’s gun came up and he fired. The weapon bucked with a scream of torn air

and the heavy-calibre Ignis bullet crossed the short distance between gunman and

target.

The round slammed into the meat of Spear’s shoulder and erupted in a blare of

brilliant white fire; the hollow tip of the bullet was filled with a pressurised mixture

of phosphoron-thermic compound. On impact, it ignited with a fierce million-degree

heat that would burn even in the absence of oxygen.

Spear was shrieking, his body shuddering as if it were trying to rip itself apart.

Kell took aim again and fired a second shot, then a third, a fourth. At this range he

could not miss. The rounds blew Spear back, the combustion of hot air boiling the

water pooled around him into steam. The white flames gathered across the killer’s

body, eating into the surface of his inhuman flesh.

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Kell did not stop. He emptied the Exitus pistol into the target, firing until the slide

locked back. He watched his enemy transform from a howling torch into a seething,

roiling mass of burned matter. Spear wavered, the screams from its sagging, molten

jaws climbing the octaves; and then there was a concussion of unnatural sound that

resonated from the creature. Kell saw the ghost of something blood-coloured and

ephemeral ripping itself from the killer’s dying meat, and heard a monstrous, furious

howl. It faded even as he tried to perceive it, and then the smoking remains fell. A

sudden wash of sulphur stink wafted over him and he gagged, coughing up blood and

thin bile. The ghost-image had fled.

Nursing his pain, Kell watched as Spear’s blackened, crumbling skeleton hissed

and crackled like fat on a griddle.

To his surprise, he saw something floating on the surface of the murky

floodwaters; tiny dots of bright colour, like flecks of gold leaf. They issued out from

the corpse of the killer, liberated by Spear’s death. When he reached for them they

disintegrated, flickering in the wan light and then gone.

“Not for revenge,” he said aloud, “For the Emperor.”

The Vindicare sat there for a long time, listening to the drumming of the rains and the

distant crashes of destruction across the distance to the capital. The explosions and

the tremors were coming closer together now, married to the gouts of harsh light

falling from the sky above. The city and everything in it was collapsing under the

rage of the Sons of Horus; soon they would turn their weapons to the port, to the

wastelands, to every place on Dagonet where life still sheltered from their thunder.

The Warmaster’s rebels and traitors would not stop on this world, or the next, or

the next. They would cut a burning path across space that would only end at Terra.

That could not come to pass. Kell’s war— his mission— was not over.

Using the Exitus rifle to support his weight, he gathered what he needed and then

the Vindicare marksman left the ruins of the terminal behind, beginning a slow walk

across the cracked runways under darkening skies.

In the distance, he saw the Ultio’s running lights snap on as the ship sensed his

approach.

240

EIGHTEEN

I Am The Weapon

Into The Light

Nemesis

The guncutter climbed the layers of cloud, punching through pockets of turbulent air

thrown into the atmosphere by storm cells, the new-born thunder-heads spawning in

the wake of orbit-fall munitions.

Somewhere behind it, down on Dagonet’s surface, the landscape was being

dissected as lance fire swept back and forth. The killing rains of energy and ballistic

warheads had broken the boundaries of the capital city limits; now they were

escaping to spread across the trembling ground, cutting earth like a keen skinning

knife crossing soft flesh.

The burning sky cradled the arrow-prowed ship, which spun and turned as it

wove a path through the cascades of plasma. No human pilot could have managed

such a feat, but the Ultio’s helmsman was less a man and more the ship itself. He

flew the vessel through the tides of boiling air as a bird would ride a thermal, his

hands the stabilators across the bow, his legs the blazing nozzles of the thrusters,

fuel-blood pumping through his rumbling engine-heart.

Ultio’s lone passenger was strapped into an acceleration couch at the very point

of the ship’s cramped bridge, watching waves of heat ripple across the invisible

bubble of void shields from behind a ring-framed cockpit canopy.

Kell muttered into the mastoid vox pickup affixed to his jawbone, subvocalising

his words into the humming reader in the arm of the couch. As the words spilled out

of him, he breathed hard and worked on attending to his injuries. The pilot had

reconfigured the gravity field in the cockpit to off-set the g-force effects of their

headlong flight, but Kell could still feel the pressure upon him. But he was thankful

for small mercies—had he not been so protected, the lift-off acceleration from the

port would have crushed him into a blackout, perhaps even punctured a lung with one

of his cracked ribs.

It remained an effort to speak, though, but he did it because he knew he was duty

bound to give his report. Even now, the Ultio’s clever subordinate machine-brains

were uploading and encoding the contents of the memory spool from Iota’s skullhelm,

and the pages of overly analytical logs Tariel had kept in his cogitator gauntlet.

When they were done, that compiled nugget of dense data would be transmitted via

burst-signal to the ship’s drive unit, still hiding in orbit, within the wreckage of a

dead space station.

241

But not without his voice to join them, Kell decided. He was mission commander.

At the end, the lay of the choices were his responsibility and he would not shirk that.

Finally, he ran out of words and bowed his head. Tapping the controls of the

reader, he pressed the playback switch to ensure his final entry had been embedded.

“My name is Eristede Kell,” he heard himself saying. “Assassin-at-Marque of

the Clade Vindicare, Epsilon-dan. And I have defied my orders.”

Nodding, he silenced himself, discarding the mastoid patch. Kell’s voice seemed

strange and distant to him; it was less a report he had made and more of a confession.

Confession. The loaded connotations of that word made him glance down, to

where he had secured Jenniker’s golden aquila about the wrist of his glove. He

searched himself, trying to find a meaning, a definition for the emotion clouding his

thoughts. But there was nothing he could grasp.

Kell pressed another switch and sent the vox recording to join the rest of the data

packet. Outside, the glowing sky had darkened through blue to purple to black, taking

the rush of air with it. Ultio was beyond the atmosphere now, and still climbing.

Each breath he took felt tainted and metallic. Thick fluids congested at his throat

and he swallowed them back with a grimace. The smell in his nostrils was no one’s

blood but his own, and while the painkillers he had injected into his neck had gone

some way towards keeping him upright, they were wearing thinner by the moment.