He was aware of the car moving forwards in fits and starts, but his attention could not stray from the grinning, angular skull. The sapphire eye-clutch shimmered and the punishing gaze of the weapon known as the animus speculum was turned upon him.
Power, raw and inchoate, sucked in from the fabric of the warp and from the guardian’s abortive attack, drawn in like light from the event horizon of a singularity, was now unleashed. A pulse of energy flashed from the psychic cannon and blasted the warlord’s bodyguard backward, slamming him into the wall of the courtyard. As he tumbled to the ground, he combusted from within, the fire consuming his flesh and his screams.
Jun Yae Jun was shouting incoherently at his driver-servitor as it used the bull-bars on the groundcar’s prow to shoulder pedestrians out of the way. The vehicle made it onto the street as fresh salvos of rocket fire tore the Red Lanes into rubble. The servitor gunned the engine and aimed the car towards the bridge that led back towards the Yae compound.
A black blur fluttered in the light of an explosion and the armoured windscreen cracked and crazed as indigo fire lashed across it. Great gobs of polymer glass denatured and collapsed, smothering the servitor in a suffocating blanket of superheated plastic. The car spun out and collided with a bollard.
Jun pulled wildly at the door’s locking handle, then stabbed it with the push-dagger. He was operating on blind panic.
Taking her time, the Culexus clambered in through the destroyed window and disarmed him, almost as an afterthought. The warlord soiled himself as the skull came closer. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry–’
‘Kiss me,’ she said, her voice devoid of all emotion.
Jun’s lips were pressed to the cold steel of the mask, and agony spiked through him. He fell back, and spat dust. Raw pain boiled at his extremities as his flesh blackened and became thick ash, crumbling before his eyes until those too rotted in their sockets and shrivelled to nothing. Jun Yae Jun’s very energy of life was drawn from him, leached into the force matrix webbing the assassin’s stealthsuit, until there was nothing left of him but a slurry of indeterminate matter.
Iota left the target’s vehicle and the area around her was suddenly drenched in brilliant white light. The downdraught from a gravity drive beat at the ground, stirring up debris and what remained of the warlord. The sensor suite inside her helm registered a gunship’s weapons grid locking on to her silhouette, and she paused, wondering if it were possible for her to die.
In the next moment, she saw a line of light across the infrared spectrum as a single high-impact bullet passed through the armoured canopy of the gunship, beheading both the pilot and the gunner. Suddenly unguided, the Cyclone’s autoflight system kicked in and brought it down to a soft landing.
Presently two men, one in the operations gear of the Vindicare clade and another in a more basic stealth rig, emerged from one of the smouldering buildings. Iota glanced at them, then went back to watching the spreading fires.
As the sniper tipped the corpses from the flyer’s cockpit, the other man warily approached her. ‘Iota?’ he asked. ‘Protiphage, Clade Culexus?’
‘Of course it’s her,’ said the Vindicare. ‘Don’t be obtuse, Tariel.’
‘You have to come with us,’ said the one called Tariel. He indicated the gunship as the sniper took the controls.
Iota ran a finger over the grinning teeth of her skull-mask. ‘Will you kiss me too?’
The man went pale. ‘Perhaps later?’
FIVE
Fears / Release / Innocence
‘Husband?’
Renia’s hand on Yosef’s shoulder shocked him out of the dreamless doze he had fallen into at the kitchen table; so much so that he almost knocked over the glass of black tea by his hand. Before it could tip, he snatched it back upright without spilling a drop.
He gave her a weak smile. ‘Heh. Quicker this time.’
Yosef’s wife gathered her thick housecoat around her and took the seat across from him. It was late, deep into the evening, and the house was unlit except for a single lume over the table. It had a sharp-edged shade around it that forced the cast light into a cone, reducing everything beyond it to vague shapes in the shadows.
‘Is Ivak up as well?’
‘No. He’s still asleep, and I’m pleased to see it. With everything that’s been going on, he’s had a lot of bad dreams.’
‘Has he?’ Yosef asked the question and immediately felt a flicker of guilt. ‘I’ve been absent a lot recently…’
‘Ivak understands,’ Renia said, cutting him off. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ she noted.
Yosef nodded and resisted the urge to yawn. ‘You and the boy had already turned in. I didn’t want to wake you, so I made tea…’ He sipped at the glass and found the contents had gone cold.
‘And fell asleep in the chair?’ She tutted quietly. ‘You’re doing this too often these days, Yosef.’ Renia brushed some stray threads of copper-coloured hair out of her eyes.
He nodded. ‘I’m sorry. It’s the investigation.’ Yosef sighed. ‘It’s… troubling.’
‘I’ve heard,’ she said. ‘The watch-wire was running stories about it for a while, before the news from Dagonet came in. Now that is all anyone is talking about.’
Yosef blinked. ‘Dagonet?’ he repeated. The planet was a trading partner with Iesta Veracrux, a few light years distant down the spine of the Taebian Sector’s mercantile routes, in a system orbiting a pale yellow sun. By the interstellar scales of the Imperium of Man, Dagonet was practically a neighbour. He asked his wife to explain; Yosef and Daig had both been buried in research on the serial murders all day long, fruitlessly looking for information about Erno Sigg, and neither of them had seen anything that wasn’t a case file or medical report.
For the first time since she had broken his dozing, Yosef realised that Renia was hiding something, and as she talked it became clear. She was worried.
‘Some ships came into the system from Dagonet,’ Renia began. ‘The Planetary Defence Force monitors couldn’t catch them all, there were so many.’
Yosef felt a peculiar thrill of fear in his chest. ‘Warships?’
She shook her head. ‘Transports, liners, that sort of thing. All Dagoneti ships. Some of them barely made it out of the warp in one piece. They were all overloaded with people. The ships were full of refugees, Yosef.’
‘Why did they come here?’ Even as he asked the question, he knew what the answer was most likely to be. Ever since stories of the galactic insurrection had broken out across the sector, Dagonet’s government had been noticeably reticent to commit on the subject.
‘They were running. Apparently, there’s an uprising going on out there. The population are split over their… loyalty.’ She said the word as if it was foreign to her, as if the idea of being disloyal to Terra was a totally alien concept. ‘It’s a revolt.’
Yosef frowned. ‘The Governor on Dagonet won’t let things run out of control. The noble clans won’t let the planet fall into anarchy. If the Imperial Army or the Astartes have to intervene there–’
Renia shook her head and touched his hand. ‘You don’t understand. It’s the Dagoneti clans who started the uprising. The Governor issued a formal statement of support for the Warmaster. The nobles have declared in favour of Horus and rejected the rule of Terra.’