The phantom-taint of the dead lawman wanted justice. It wanted revenge for every victim in the killer’s bloody annals.
Every soul of those that Spear had slaughtered and looted, every ghost he had pillaged to assume them, to corrupt them into his disguises, each had tasted like a special kind of fear. A fear of loss of self, worse than death.
Now that fear was in him, as Spear clawed at the ragged edge of his own mind, dangling over the brink of a psychic abyss.
And when he spoke, he heard Yosef Sabrat’s voice.
‘Stop him!’
The face was not the thing of fangs and horns and dark voids any more. It belonged to a man, just a man in pain and sorrow, peering out at him as if through the bars of the deepest prison in all creation.
Kell’s breath was struck from him by the grief in those all-too-human eyes. He had seen it enough times, witnessed at a distance in the moment when death claimed a life. The sudden, final understanding in the eyes of a target. The pain and the truth.
He raced forward, ignoring the spirals of hot agony from the broken, grinding edges of his ribcage, stabbing slim throwing knives from his wrist-guard into the torso of the Spear-thing.
It cried out and he pushed past it, falling, slipping on the wet-slick tiles beneath his feet. Kell rolled, clutching for the fallen pistol, fingers grasping the grip.
The killer was coming for him, festoons of claws and talons exploding from every surface on its lurching body, the human face disappearing as it was swallowed 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.
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.
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 thunderheads 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 skull-helm, 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.
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.’