‘Nothing lucky about it,’ said the leader. ‘You’re not the first. Won’t be the last.’
‘I beg to differ,’ Valdor told him. ‘As I said, you made an error. You’ve drawn the attention of the Emperor.’
The use of the name sent a ripple of fear through the group, but the gang leader stamped on it quickly. ‘Rust and shit, you’re some kind of liar, freak. No one cares what goes on out here, not a one, not a man, not the bloody Emperor hisself. If he cared, he’d come here and share a little of that glory of his with us.’
‘Let’s just kill them,’ said the gunner.
‘Valdor!’ Tariel blurted out his name in fear. ‘Please!’
Unseen by everyone else, the glimmer from the distant hill blinked once, then twice. ‘Let me tell you who I am,’ said the Custodian. ‘My name is Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Legio Custodes, and I hold the power of the Emperor’s displeasure in my hands.’
The gang leader snorted with cold amusement. ‘Your brain is broke, that’s what you have!’
‘I will prove it to you.’ Valdor raised his arm and pointed a finger at the gunner behind the multilaser. ‘In the Emperor’s name,’ he said, his tone calm and conversational, ‘death.’
A heartbeat later, the gunner’s upper torso exploded into chunks of meat on a blast of pink fluids.
The fear that the Emperor’s name had briefly conjured returned tenfold. Valdor pointed to the rifleman standing over Tariel. ‘And death,’ he went on. The junkhunter’s body bifurcated at the spine with a wet chug, collapsing to the sand. ‘And death, and death, and death…’ The Custodian let his arm fall, and stood still as three more of the gang were torn apart where they stood.
Tariel dived into the dirt and the rest of the junkhunters broke apart in a terrified scramble, some of them racing towards a vehicle, others desperately trying to find cover. Valdor saw one of them leap into a dunerider and gun the engine, the vehicle surging away. The windscreen shattered in a red blink of blood and the rover bounded into a shallow gulley, crashing to a halt. The others died as they ran.
A furious snarl drew Valdor’s attention back and he looked up as the gang leader came speeding towards him – too fast for a normal human, quite clearly nerve-jacked as he had first suspected. The junkhunter had the plasma gun aimed at the Custodian’s chest; at this close a range, a blast from it would be a mortal wound.
Valdor did nothing, stood his ground. Then, like the work of an invisible trickster god, the gun was ripped from the gang leader’s hand and it spun away into the air, the mechanism torn open and spitting great licks of blue-white sparks.
Only then did Valdor step in and break the man’s neck with a short chopping motion to his throat. The last of the junkhunter band dropped and was still.
The sun was dipping towards the horizon when a piece of the desert seemed to detach itself and transform into the shape of a man. A cameoline cloak shimmered from the colours of the rust-sand to a deep night-black, revealing a muscular figure in a stealthsuit that was faceless behind a gunmetal spy mask. The mask’s green eye-band studied Valdor and Tariel, where the two of them had sought shelter in the lee of the parked GEV truck. A spindly rifle, easily as long as the man was tall, lay across his back.
Valdor gave him a nod. ‘Eristede Kell, I presume?’
‘You are out of uniform, Captain-General,’ said the marksman. ‘I hardly recognised you.’ His voice was low.
Valdor raised an eyebrow. ‘Have we met before?’
The sniper shook his head. ‘No. But I know you. And your work.’ He glanced at the infocyte.
‘Vindicare,’ said Tariel, by way of terse greeting.
‘Vanus,’ came the reply.
‘I’m curious,’ said Kell. ‘How did you know I would be watching?’
‘You’ve been in this sector for some time. It stood to reason you would have seen the crash.’ The Custodian gestured around. ‘I had intended to find some of your prey in order to find you. It seems events altered the order of that but not the result.’
Tariel shot Valdor a look. ‘That’s why you didn’t attack them? You could have dealt with them all, but you did nothing.’ He grimaced. ‘I might have been killed!’
‘I considered letting that happen,’ said the sniper, with a casual sniff. ‘But I dismissed the idea. If a pair as unlikely as you two had come out here, I knew there had to be good reason.’
‘You almost missed that thug with the plasma gun!’ snapped the infocyte.
‘No,’ said Valdor, with a half-smile, ‘he did not.’
The sniper cocked his head. ‘I never miss.’
‘You came to the Atalantic zone without your vox rig,’ Valdor went on.
‘Comm transmissions would have been detected,’ said Kell. ‘It would have given me away to the bandits.’
‘Hence our somewhat unconventional method of locating you,’ continued the Custodian.
Tariel’s eyes narrowed. ‘How did you know when to fire?’
‘His weapon’s scope contains a lip-reading auspex,’ Valdor answered for the sniper. ‘Your assignment was open-ended, I believe.’
‘I’ve been systematically terminating the raider gangs as I find them,’ said Kell. ‘I still have work to do. And it makes good exercise.’
‘You have a new mission now,’ said Tariel. ‘We both do.’
‘Is that so?’ Kell reached up and took off the spy mask, revealing a craggy face with close-cut black hair, sharp eyes and hawkish nose. ‘Who is the target?’
Valdor stood up, and pulled a mag-flare tube from a compartment in his chest plate, aiming it into the sky. ‘All in good time,’ he said, and fired.
Kell’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are leading this mystery mission then, Captain-General?’
‘Not I,’ said the Custodian, shaking his head as the flare ignited, casting jumping shadows all around them. ‘You, Eristede.’
FOUR
Blood / Weapons / Face and Name
The coleopter’s chattering rotors made it impossible to have a conversation at normal levels in the cabin, and Yosef was reduced to growling into Daig’s ear in order to get something approximating privacy. ‘It’s the pattern I’m not certain about,’ he said.
Daig had a fan-fold file open on his lap, one hand holding in the slips of vinepaper, the other gripping a thick data-slate. ‘What pattern?’
‘Exactly,’ Yosef replied. ‘There isn’t one. Every time we’ve had a crazed lunatic go on a killing spree like this, there’s been some kind of logic to it, no matter how twisted. Someone is murdered because they remind the killer of their abusive stepfather, or because the voices in their head told them that all people who wear green are evil…’ He pointed a finger at the file. ‘But what’s the link here? Latigue, Norte and the others? They’re from all different walks of life, men and women, old and young, tall and short…’ Yosef shook his head. ‘If there’s a commonality between them, I haven’t seen it yet.’
‘Well, don’t worry,’ Daig said flatly, ‘there will be plenty of people willing to throw in their half-baked theories about it. After Latigue’s death, you can bet the watch-wire will be buzzing with this.’
Yosef cursed under his breath; with everything else that had been on his mind, he hadn’t stopped to think that if the Eurotas Consortium had become involved with the case, then of course the Iestan news services would have got wind of it into the bargain. ‘As if they don’t have enough doom and gloom to put on the watch-wire already,’ he said. ‘By all means, let’s add to everyone’s woes with the fear of a knife in the belly from every dark alleyway.’