The Eversor existed only in a permanent state of the furious now and matters of before and after were limited to the most transitory of elements. Before, just heartbeats earlier, he had beheaded a guard attempting to down him with some kind of heavy webber cannon. In a moment more, he would leap the distance across the open space where the handling gantry for the flyers did not reach, in order to land among the group of technicians who were fleeing towards a doorway. In these small ways, the Garantine allowed himself to comprehend the nature of past and future, but to go beyond that was pointless.
It was the manner of his life that he existed in the thick of the killing. He had a dim understanding of the other times, the times when he would lie in the baths of amnio-fluids as the patient machines of his clade healed his wounds or upgraded the stimjectors and drug glands throughout his body. The times when, in the dreamless no-sleep between missions, hypnogoge data streams would unfold in his head like blossoms of information, target profiles linked to mood-triggers that would give him bursts of elation for every kill, jolts of pleasure for each waypoint reached, jerks of pain if he deviated off-programme.
These things had not happened here, though. He reflected on that as he completed his leap, his augmented muscles relaxing to take the impact of landing, the sheer force of his arrival killing one of the fleeing technicians immediately. As he spun about, the knife-claws on his hands and feet opening veins, the grinning rictus of his steel skull-mask steaming with splashes of blood, he searched for a programme, for a set of victory conditions.
There was none. Digging deeper, he reached for his stunted past. He remembered back as far as he could – an hour, perhaps? He replayed the moment. A sudden awakening. The transit cocoon that held him in its silent, womb-like space, where he could wait out the non-time until his next glorious release; suddenly broken. An error, or something else? Enemy action? That assumption was the Garantine’s default setting, after all. He reasoned – as much as he was able – that surely if he had been awakened for any other reason, the hypnogoges would have ensured he knew why.
But there was nothing. No parameters, only wakefulness. And for an Eversor, to be awake was to be in the glory of killing. A cocktail of stimulants and battle drugs boiled through his bloodstream, heavy doses of Fury, Spur and Psychon synthesised to order by the compact biofac implants in his abdomen. Under normal circumstances, the Garantine would have been armed with more than just his skinplanted offensive weapons and helm-mask; he would have been sheathed in armour and arrayed with a suite of servo-systems. That he did not have these only served to modify the killer’s approach to his targets. He had taken and employed several light stubber guns, using each until the ammo drum ran dry, then making the weapons into clubs he used to beat his kills to the floor; but the stubbers were only good for a few hits before his violence broke them across the frame and he was forced to discard them.
He punched a man with enough energy that it shattered his skull, and then he vaulted a makeshift barricade, moving faster than the men hiding behind it could aim. He killed them with their own guns and ran on, deeper through the complex.
Parts of the building might have looked familiar to him, if the Garantine had been able to stop the racing pace of his thoughts, if he had been able to slow his kill-need for just a moment; but he could do neither.
In the absence of orders, with no target to aim for, the Eversor did what he was trained to do; and he would go on, killing here and then moving on to the next set of targets, and the next and the next, forever in the moment.
Afterwards, Daig felt refreshed by his experience, but he had not come to the meeting for personal reasons. While some of the others talked amongst themselves, the reeve took Noust to one side and the two men shared cups of the warm wine, and questions.
Noust listened in silence to Daig’s explanation of his caseload, and at length, he gave a nod. ‘I know Erno Sigg. I guessed that might be why you’d come to see me. His face was on the public watch-wire. Said that he was sought after to assist in your “enquiries”.’
Daig suppressed a wince. Laimner, on Telemach’s orders, had deliberately leaked Sigg’s image to the media in a ham-fisted attempt to flush him into the open; but if anything, it appeared to have driven the man deeper into hiding.
Noust continued. ‘He’s a troubled fellow, to be certain. Someone without a compass, you could say. But that’s where the Theoge can be of help to a man. He learned of the text while he was incarcerated, from a ship-hand. Erno found another path with us.’ He looked away. ‘At least, for a time he did.’
Daig leaned in. ‘What do you mean?’
Noust eyed him. ‘Is that you asking, Daig Segan? Or is it the Sentine?’
‘Both,’ he replied. ‘This is important. You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.’
‘Aye, that’s so.’ Noust sighed. ‘Here’s the thing. For a while, Erno was a regular fixture here, and he was trying to make something of himself. He wanted to make amends. Erno was working to become a better man than the angry, frustrated thug he’d left out there in space. It’s a long road, but he knew that. But then he started to come around less often.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘A few demilunars ago. Two, maybe. When I did see him, he was twitchy. He said that he was going to have to pay for what he had done.’ Noust paused, sorting through his thoughts. ‘I got the impression that someone was… I don’t know, following him? He was irritable, paranoid. All the old, bad traits coming back to the fore.’
Daig rubbed his chin. ‘He may have killed people.’
Noust gave the reeve a shocked look. ‘No. Never. Maybe once upon a time, but not now. He’s not capable of that, not any more. I’d swear that to the God-Emperor himself.’
‘I need to find Erno,’ said Daig. ‘If he’s innocent, we need to prove it. We… I need to protect all this.’ He gestured around. ‘I found my path here. I can’t lose it.’ Daig imagined what might happen if Telemach or Laimner got hold of Sigg, broke him in interrogation and then found the door to this place. In their secular, clinical world there was no place for the revelation of the Imperial Truth, the undeniable reality of the Emperor’s shining divinity. The church, such as it was, and all the others like it would be torn down, burned away, and the words of the Lectitio Divinitatus that had so transformed Daig Segan when he read them would be erased and left unheard. They would use Sigg and the crimes to excuse them as they put a torch to it all.
‘The Emperor protects,’ said Noust.
‘And I’ll help Him do it, if you give me the chance,’ insisted the reeve. ‘Just tell me where Erno Sigg is hiding.’
Noust finished his drink. ‘All right, brother.’
Behind her, she heard the clattering thunder of auto-fire and more screams. Iota skidded to a halt on the cold metal floor and cocked her head, letting her skull-helm’s autosenses take readings and pass the analysis back to her. He was very close; she had attracted his interest by appearing in the middle of a companionway, letting him see her clearly, and then breaking into a run. The Eversor knew another assassin when he saw one, and she was without doubt the most serious threat vector the rage-killer had encountered since his awakening. He was coming for her, but that didn’t stop him from pausing along the way to dispatch any of the facility’s staff who were unlucky enough to cross his path. The murderers of the Clade Eversor were like that; for all their bloody violence and instinct-driven brutality, they were still methodical. They left no witnesses, nothing but corpses.