The Beast Arises

‘The image quality will be lacking, Fabricator General,’ said the genetor apologetically. ‘The woman was fresh, but drawing information from an unmodified brain is always the hardest. Editicore processors are the best, but even the least intelligence core can offer up a mind’s secrets. Alas, here we must rely on the primitive wiring of the flesh.’

He threw a lever with one three-fingered metal hand. An elliptical screen flickered on the wall.

‘There. The most recent memory I could recover, and I believe the most relevant. To go through her entire life will take time, even those few fragments that survived her death. But I think this will be helpful, great prime.’

Kubik ignored the prattling of the genetor, and watched the picts run, a jumble of images in no particular order. A lesser mind would have made no sense of them, but Kubik’s augmetics automatically recorded the images, and began to re-edit them into something approaching usability. He watched a scene from a few days ago, the gathering of an Assassin cadre. They stood around the loading ramp of an automated haulage barge in an obscure section of the Olympian landing fields. Where exactly, Kubik could not tell. There were five of them. The dead girl, three more on foot, one in a cryo-containment unit. Kubik seethed to see them meeting in the shadow of his own seat of power. The images jumped, running out of sequence, the scene changing to the vagaries of imperfect human recollection.

Four Assassins remained at liberty. Five was an unusually high number for one cell. Kubik had sat in the Senatorum for hundreds of years and had been involved in the authorisation votes for several high-level assassinations. One Assassin could topple the government of a world. But five? Deployment of such a number within the Imperium was reserved for the holders of the very highest offices, those who could call upon substantial resources — rogue admirals, corrupt cardinals, the renegade lords of star systems, or perhaps even a High Lord of Terra…

Kubik appraised the images, using what little he knew of the Officio Assassinorum to fit the operatives with the temples. The metronomic tick of his augmetic regulators stuttered when he identified the Eversor Temple adept within the cryo-containment pod, a creature so violent it had to be kept in suspended animation.

A further jumble of images showed him Vangorich on the ramp of the ship. Vangorich had been on Mars — he had come to Mars on one of Kubik’s own vessels! Kubik’s anger rose. The cell had been deployed by his direct order. This was no routine mission.

The images played one last time, and faded out.

‘That is the extent of it, my lord. There is no more,’ said the genetor.

‘Your efforts are noted,’ said Kubik, and departed the chamber without further word. He had seen enough.

Five Assassins. There could be only one explanation. One reason to deploy such a powerful cadre on Mars. Was there not only one target of sufficient power and value? Only one so well protected that five of the most deadly killers in the galaxy would be required to ensure certain death?

Himself.

Vangorich intended to kill him.

The auditorium seemed bigger than ever to Mesring. The masses of worshippers within the nave of the vast subterranean cathedral seemed to stretch away into infinity, a sea of hopeless souls beseeching him for salvation. Vat-cherubs and psyber-birds jostled for space with servo-skulls in the incense-choked air. The breathing of the crowd was a soft wind.

Mesring was sweating long before the sermon was done. The free-floating vox-horns and vox-pieces on ornate stands crowded in on him. He stumbled through his second homily, cutting short the service with a hurried blessing when his tongue thickened and stuck in his mouth halfway through the third.

The ranks of cardinals at the back of Auditorium Oratio stage stared as he lurched past them.

‘Your holiness?’ one asked.

He ignored her, banging through the doors, his Frateris Templar guard catching him before he ploughed into the corridor wall opposite. Head spinning, he left the Auditorium Oratio and blundered along thick carpets towards his private exit. By the time he had left the Basilica Vox Imperatorum, he had difficulty walking, staggering past his sedan chair and the waiting servitors. Three lesser priests gently turned him around and put him inside. The box lurched as the servitor bearers engaged their wheels, carrying him swiftly down the five-kilometre corridor to his private apartments. His Frateris Templars fell in beside the chair, running alongside in escort.

The sedan took him deep into the heartlands of the Ecclesiarchal hive, up long ramps to the side of the mountainous staircases leading to his palace. It drew to a halt outside the main gates in anticipation of his dismounting, but the Frateris Templar runners shouted to the guard, ‘Open the gates! Open the gates! The Ecclesiarch is taken ill!’