Nemesis

Tariel expected to feel a crippling terror when the others vanished into the shadows of the building, but he did not. He was never really alone, not if he were to be honest with himself. The infocyte found the makings of a good hide in a blown-out administratum room on the mezzanine level of the main terminal, a processing chamber where new arrivals to Dagonet would have been brought for interview by planetary officials before being given formal entry. The eyerats scrambled around him, sniffing at the corners and patrolling the places where there were holes in the walls or missing doorways; his two remaining psyber eagles were watching the main spaces of the atrium and occasionally snapping at the native carrion scavengers when they became too curious.

In a corner formed by two fallen walls, Tariel dropped into a lotus settle and used the cogitator gauntlet to bring up a schematic of the building. It was among the millions of coils worth of files he had copied from the stacks of the Dagonet governmental librariums over the past few weeks, the data siphoned into his personal mnemonic stores. It was habitual of him to do such a thing; if he saw information untended, he took it for himself. It wasn’t theft, for nothing was stolen; but on some level Tariel regarded data left unsecured – or at least data that had not been secured well – as fundamentally belonging to him. If it was there, he had to have it. And it always had its uses, as this moment proved.

Working quickly, he allowed the new scans filtering in from the rats and the eagles to update the maps, blocking out the zones where civil war, rebel attack and careless Astartes bombardments had damaged the building. But the data took too many picoseconds to update; the vox interference was strong enough to be causing problems with his data bursts as well. If matters became worse, he might be forced to resort to deploying actual physical connections.

And there was more disappointment to come. The swarm of netflys he had released on entering the building were reporting in sporadically. The infrastructure of the star-port was so badly damaged that all its internal scrying systems and vid-picters were inert. Tariel would be forced to rely on secondary sensing.

He held his breath, listening to the susurrus of the contaminated rainfall on the broken glass skylights overhead, and the spatter of the runoff on the broken stonework; and then, very distinctly, Tariel heard the sound of a piece of rubble falling, disturbed by a misplaced footstep.

Immediately, a datum-feed from one of the eyerats out in the corridor ceased and the other rodents scrambled for cover, their adrenaline reads peaking.

The infocyte was on his feet before he could stop himself. The lost rat had reported its position as only a few hundred metres from where he now stood.

I will make sure that nothing ever gets close enough to kill me. Tariel’s skin went clammy as his words to Kell returned to him, damning the Vanus with his foolish arrogance. He moved as quickly as he dared, abandoning his makeshift hide and ducking out through a rent in the fallen wall. He heard the psyber eagles take wing above as he moved.

Tariel flinched as he passed through a stream of stale-smelling water dripping down from above, dropping from ledge to ledge until he was in the atrium. He glanced around quickly; the chamber was modelled on a courtyard design. There were galleries and balconies, some ornamental, some not. Through the eyes of one of the birds, he saw a spot that had strong walls to the back and three distinct lines of approach and escape. Pulling his coat tighter, he moved towards it in the shadows, quick and swift, as he had been taught.

As he ran he tabbed the start-up sequence for the pulse generator and sent dozens of test signals to his implanted vox bead; only static answered him. Now, for the first time, he felt alone, even as the feeds from the implanted micropicters in the skulls of his animals followed him in his run. The tiny images clustered around his forearm, hovering in the hololithic miasma.

He was almost across the span of the courtyard when Spear fell silently out of the dimness above him and landed in a crouch on top of an overturned stone bench. The face of red flesh, silver fangs and black eyes looked up and found him.

Tariel was so shocked he jumped back a step, every muscle in his body shaking with surprise.

‘What is this?’ muttered the killer. Those blank, sightless eyes cut into him. The voice was almost human, though, and it had a quizzical edge, as if the monstrosity didn’t know what to make of the trembling, thin man in front of him.