The flyer’s pilot was deft; isolated in the cockpit pod at the prow, she lay wired into a flight couch that translated her nerve impulses into the minute flexions of the transport’s winglets and the outputs of the engine bells. The aircraft’s course was swift and true, crossing the barren zone on a heading towards the distant city-cluster crowded around the peaks of the Ayzor Ridge; she was following a well-traced course familiar to many of the more daring pilots. Those who played it safe flew at much higher altitudes, in the officially-sanctioned sky corridors governed by the agents of the Ministorum and the Adeptus Terra – but that cost fuel and time, and for fringer pilots working on tight margins, sometimes the riskier choice was the better one. The hazards came from the rust storms and the winds – but also from more human sources as well. The vast erg of the Atalantic was also home to bandit packs and savage clans of junkhunters.
At first glance, the cargo being carried by the flyer was nothing remarkable – but one who looked closer would have understood it was only a make-weight, there to bulk out the transport’s flimsy flight plan. The real load aboard the craft was the two passengers, and they were men so unlike to one another, it could hardly be believed they had both been dispatched by the same agency.
Constantin Valdor sat in a gap between two cube-containers of purified water, cross-legged on the deck of the cargo bay. His bulk was hidden beneath the ill-defined layers of a sandcloak which concealed an articulated suit of ablative armour. It was by no means a relative to the elaborate and majestic Custodian wargear that was his normal garb; the armour was unsophisticated, scarred and heavily pitted with use. Over Valdor’s dense form it strained to maintain its shape, almost as if it were trying to hold him in. At his side was a careworn long-las inscribed with Technomad tribal runes and an explorer’s pack containing survival gear and supplies, the latter for show. With his enhanced physiology, Valdor would have been able to live for weeks on the plains on drops of moisture he sucked from the dirt or the sparse meat of insects. The rifle he could use, though. Everything about Valdor’s disguise was there to tell a vague fiction, not enough to hide from a deep analysis but enough to allow him to go on his way without arousing too much suspicion. The Custodian had done this many times before, in blood games and on missions of other import. This was no different, he reflected.
Across the cargo bay, sitting uncomfortably upon a canvas seat that vibrated each time the transport forded a pocket of turbulence, Valdor’s companion on this journey was bent forwards over his right arm. Wearing a sandcloak similar to the Custodian’s, the smaller man was busy with a pane of hololithic text projected from a cybernetic gauntlet clasped around his wrist. With his other hand he manipulated shapes in the hologrammatic matrix, his attention on it total and complete. His name was Fon Tariel; the light of the text threw colour over his pale olive skin and the dark ovals of his eyes. A tight nest of dreadlocks drawing over Tariel’s head did their best to hide discreet bronze vents in the back of his skull, where interface sockets gleamed alongside memory implants and dataphilia. Unlike the cohorts of the Mechanicum, who willingly gave themselves fully to the marriage of flesh and machine, Tariel’s augmentations were discreet and nuanced.
Valdor studied him through lidded eyes, careful to be circumspect about it. The Sigillite had presented Tariel to him in a manner that made it clear no questioning of his choice would be allowed. The little man was Sire Vanus’s contribution to the Execution Force, one of the clade’s newest operatives, with a skull crammed full of data and a willingness to serve. They called Tariel’s kind ‘infocytes’; essentially they were human computing engines, but at the very far opposite of the spectrum from the mindless meat-automata of servitors. In matters of strategy and tactics, the insight of an infocyte was unparalleled; their existence cemented Clade Vanus as the intelligence-gathering faction of the Officio Assassinorum. It was said they had never been known to make an error of judgement. Valdor considered that as little more than disinformation, however; the creation and dissemination of propaganda was also a core strength of the Vanus.
From the corner of his eye, the Custodian saw the movement of a monitor camera high up on the roof of the cargo bay. He had noted earlier that it appeared to be dwelling on him more than it should have, and now the device’s attention seemed solely fixed on him. Without turning his head, Valdor saw that Tariel had moved slightly so that his holoscreen was now concealed by the bulk of his body.
The Custodian’s lip curled, and with a quick motion he was on his feet, crossing the short distance between the two of them. Tariel reacted with a flash of panic, but Valdor was on him, grabbing his arm. The hololith showed the monitor’s point of view, locked onto the Custodian. Data streams haloed his image, feeding out bio-patterns and body kinestics; Tariel had somehow invaded and co-opted the flyer’s internal security systems to satisfy his own curiosity.
‘Don’t spy on me,’ Valdor told the infocyte. ‘I value my privacy.’
‘You can’t blame me,’ Tariel blurted. ‘I wondered who you were.’
Valdor considered this for a moment, still holding him in an immobile grip. They had both boarded the transport in silence, neither speaking until this moment; he was not surprised that the other man had let his inquisitiveness outstrip his caution. Tariel and his kind had the same relationship with raw information that an addict did with their chosen vice; they were enrapt by the idea of new data, and would do whatever they could to gather it in, and know it. Quite how that balanced with the Assassinorum’s obsessive need for near-total secrecy he could not imagine; perhaps it went some way towards explaining the peculiar character of the Vanus clade and its agents. ‘Then who am I?’ he demanded. ‘If I caught you staring at me through that camera, then surely you have been doing that and more since we first left the Imperial City.’
‘Let go of my hand, please,’ said Tariel. ‘You’re hurting me.’
‘Not really,’ Valdor told him, but he released his grip anyway.
After a moment, the infocyte nodded. ‘You are Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Custodian Guard, margin of error less than fourteen percent. I parsed this from physiological data and existing records, along with sampling of various other information streams.’ Tariel showed him; inputs from sources as diverse as traffic routings, listings of foodstuffs purchased by the Palace consumery, the routes of cleaning automata, renovation files from the forges that repaired the robots Valdor had smashed during his morning exercises… To the warrior it seemed like a wall of white noise, but the infocyte manipulated it effortlessly.
‘That is… impressive,’ he offered. ‘But not the work of an assassin, I would think.’
Tariel’s expression stiffened at that. ‘Clade Vanus has removed many of the Imperium’s enemies. We do our part, as you do, Captain-General.’
Valdor leaned in, looming over the man. ‘And how many enemies of Terra have you killed, Fon Tariel?’
The infocyte paused, blinking. ‘In the way that you would consider it a termination? None. But I have been instrumental in the excision of a number of targets.’
‘Such as?’
For a moment, he thought Tariel would refuse to answer, but then the infocyte began to speak, quickly and curtly, as if he were giving a data download. ‘I will provide you with an example. Lord-Elective Corliss Braganza of the Triton-B colony.’
‘I know the name. A delinquent and a criminal.’
‘In effect. I discovered through program artefacts uncovered during routine information-trawling that he was in the process of embezzling Imperial funds as part of a plan to finance a move against several senior members of the Ministorum. He was attempting to build a powerbase through which to influence Imperial colonial policy. Through the use of covert blinds, I inserted materials of an incendiary nature into Braganza’s personal datastacks. The resultant discovery of these fabrications led to his death at the hands of his co-conspirators, and in turn the revelation of their identities.’