Why did Vangorich want Vernor Zeck dead? Vangorich confided a lot in Krule, but not everything. Krule had seen how ineffectual the High Lords had become, he understood Vangorich’s frustration. But why Zeck? Zeck had been no worse than the others, and in Krule’s estimation, he had been a sight better than most of them. Most of the High Lords were either good at running their adepta but not very good at politics, or the reverse. Zeck was among maybe three of the High Twelve that were good at both. The Grand Provost Marshal did not take much for himself in the way of riches and prestige. He did his duty, in fact, he did more. He took as much interest in the local Arbitrators of Terra as he did in the more prestigious, star-spanning lawgivers of the Adeptus Arbites. The fact that Krule was watching over some run-down sub-precinct at the back end of the world, and not stalking the halls of a palace, was proof of that.
A facility for the common touch and an interest in all levels of his organisation might not be the only reasons Zeck was there. It could also signify something else; it could be proof that Zeck knew he was being watched. Better to be attacked surrounded by seasoned urban warfare specialists than soft servants in the high hives. If that was the case, then Krule’s gambit here was not going to work. He was going to have to go in and finish the job personally.
Zeck’s private vehicle waited outside the sub-precinct, protected by four Adeptus Arbites armoured suppression transports. It had been on the curb for hours. That was the first issue provoking Krule’s nerves. The second was the inexorable train of thought that thundered through his mind as often as the monorails shuttling dead-eyed scribes between the only two buildings they’d ever see.
It went like this. If Zeck was judged worthy of termination, a fate Krule thought he did not deserve, then why not all the High Lords? And if all the High Lords were in line for assassination, then the reason Krule was here might be that his own specialisation best equipped him to deal with the massively augmented Grand Provost Marshal. But it could also be that Vangorich wanted Krule out of the way while his grand plan played out. That was bad news, because it meant Vangorich had lost his trust in his favoured weapon.
Vangorich’s trust was not something Krule wished to lose. If Vangorich was shutting him out, it would be a short step to shutting him down.
He returned his attention to the mission. There was only the mission, he had been taught that since his earliest years. There was no higher authority than the Grand Master. He repeated this to himself until it made a nonsensical babble in his mind, and yet his doubts grew stronger.
What if Vangorich wanted him dead too?
The sound of a poorly maintained door sliding open drew his attention back to the sub-precinct. Krule held up his magnoculars to his eyes. A man who looked very much like the Grand Provost Marshal got into his private transport. A second later, this same man was comprehensively gassed by the toxin microdevice Krule had secreted in its chassis. Green fog billowed from the vehicle, corroding everything it touched.
As alarms blared the length of the street and Arbitrators flooded from the building, Krule reviewed the pict capture of his magnoculars. The man was too broad, too short; only by millimetres, but there it was. The heat pattern of his organics did not match the data files contained in the magnoculars.
That was not Zeck.
Screeching tyres sounded up the road. An armoured speedster sent up clouds of blue smoke as it burned synthrubber on the potholed hardtop. Someone was panicking.
‘That is Zeck,’ said Krule.
He unfolded himself from his hiding place and dropped six metres to the ground. He yanked a piece of scrap plasteel from the side of the monorail pylon, uncovering a high-powered motorbike.
Less than a second later, he was in pursuit, Arbitrators shouting and firing ineffectually as he roared off after the speedster.
The light car raced along the underhive streets at breakneck speed, hurtling down the road, driving straight at piles of garbage and blasting them apart. The speedster took a right-angle turn down a narrow lane into a slum. Filthy shacks squatting in the ruins of dead civilisations were shattered by the ground car’s prow. The dispossessed scattered in every direction. Krule jinked around them skilfully. The driver was good, but no one was as good as Krule.
The speedster accelerated towards a bridge over a riverbed dry of water for dozens of centuries. The rusting supports of the bridge whipped past. To the left was an ancient seabed, the braided marks of the dead river’s outflow still visible under cluttered piles of junk. A little further out, where the seabed flattened, the hive bottom rested directly on Terra’s rock. A wall of plasteel higher than a cliff hurried the horizon near. Dirty windows looked over the stone and filth of Terra’s true self.
In the bottom of the wall was a neglected transit tunnel edged with dirty hazard striping. Placards indicated it led to the upper levels of the Nozaylant hive. No one in the underhive was wealthy enough to own private transportation, and no one from above would want to go there. The road was as empty of traffic as the river was of water, its toll gates derelict.
Sensing escape, the driver accelerated the speedster. Krule opened the throttle on the bike, sending it hurtling after with an animal roar that reverberated around that small metal hell. The car approached the tube. Krule depressed a button on his bike’s handlebar, sending a compact rocket streaking from the front fairing. It hit the car’s rear-right wheel just as it was nearing the tunnel and blasted the wheel free, sending it burning and bouncing off the abandoned road into a cluster of ruins that must have been twenty thousand years old if they were a day. The car bucked, slewing off the road, and impacted with a fatal crunch into the edge of the tunnel. Krule decelerated. He drew his pistol and leapt off the bike, leaving its machine-spirit autodrive to take it away from him.
He rolled as he landed, coming up with both hands on the gun. His sleeveless, skintight mission suit was covered in filth from his wait. His hair itched. Krule was not in a good mood.
The flames of ruptured fuel cells burst from the car’s engine compartment. A pathetic machine whining came from its on-board systems, the sound of a terrified prey animal.
He went to the driver’s station first. The windows were opaque from the outside, and he couldn’t see in. Holding his pistol in one hand, he punched his adamantium-reinforced fists through the window, grabbed the door and ripped it free. A man who can rip a car door off, he thought, and I was helpless against the orks of Ullanor.
Krule realised he was allowing his frustrations of the last months to distract him, and that nearly cost him his life. He was too slow putting a frozen needle of toxin into the head of the driver.
The rear door of the car burst off in a shower of glass. Krule turned as it flew through the air and landed with a bang on the road, dragging a trail of sparks from the rough surface. That delay could not be regained. Half a second, but that brief span of time would have enabled him to fill Zeck with toxin needles if he hadn’t been thinking about orks.
Zeck’s bionic hand slapped Krule’s gun hard, breaking it and sending it wheeling through space to be lost in the detritus of man’s forgotten past.
‘Krule. The Grand Master’s pet,’ said Zeck. He hauled himself from the wreck of the car and the remnants of his uniform fell burning from his body. His torso, exposed, revealed how much of Vernor Zeck’s original body remained, and it was a low proportion of the whole. All of his left side had been replaced with banded plasteel, from below his sternum to the tips of his fingers. His right arm possessed a little more of his birth organics, being augmetic only below the shoulder. Both of his legs were mechanical. The few patches of skin uncovered by metal were livid with fresh burns. Zeck appeared not to feel them.