The reply was almost immediate, meaning that there was a ship nearby. ‘Koyne?’ A male voice, gruff with it.
The Callidus immediately copied the tonality and replied. ‘You have broken my silent protocol.’
‘We’re here to help you conclude your mission as quickly as possible. You have new orders.’
‘I have no idea who you fools are, or what authority you may think you have. But you are compromising my operation and getting in my way.’ Koyne grimaced. It was an ugly expression on the grey face. ‘I don’t require any help from you. Don’t interrupt me again.’ The Callidus cut the channel and turned away. Such behaviour was totally unprofessional. The clade knew that once committed, an assassin’s cover should not be compromised except in the direst of circumstances – and someone’s impatience was certainly not reason enough.
Koyne sat and concentrated on Gergerra Rei, on his voice, his gait, the full sense of the man. Skin puckered and moved, thickening. Implants slowly expanded to add mass and dimension. Moment by moment, the killer changed.
But the task was still incomplete when the three Crusaders crashed in through the doorway, searching for a target.
Kell glared at the vox pickup before him. ‘Well. That was discourteous,’ he muttered.
‘Arrogance is a noted character trait of many of the Clade Callidus,’ Iota offered.
The Garantine looked at Kell from across the Ultio’s cramped bridge. ‘What are we supposed to do? Take in a show? Have a little dinner?’ The hulking killer growled in irritation. ‘Put me down on the station. I’ll bring the slippery changer freak back here in pieces.’
Before Kell could reply, a sensor telltale on one of the consoles began to blink. Tariel motioned at the hololiths around his gauntlet and his expression grew grave. ‘The ship reads energy weapon discharges close to Koyne’s location.’ He looked up, out past the nose of the ship to where the hull of Saros Station drifted nearby. ‘The Callidus may be in trouble.’
‘We should assist,’ said Iota.
‘Koyne didn’t want any help,’ Kell replied. ‘Made that very clear.’
Tariel gestured at his display. ‘Auspex magno-scan shows multiple mechanoid units in the area. War robots, Vindicare. If the Callidus becomes trapped–’
Kell held up a hand to silence him. ‘The Master of Assassins chose this one for good reason. Let’s consider this escape a test of skill, shall we? We’ll see how good this Koyne is.’
The Garantine gave a rough snort of amusement.
Koyne made it into the enclosed avenue outside the apartments with only minor injuries. The Callidus had been able to recover the memory sword from the steel corpse of the aide, realising far too late that there had to have been a failsafe backup biocortex inside the machine, one that broadcast an alert to the rest of Rei’s bodyguard maniple. Koyne did not doubt that other robots were likely vectoring to this location from the Mech-Lord’s ship, operating on a kill-switch protocol that activated with the death of their master. The core directive would be simple – seek and destroy Gergerra Rei’s murderer.
If only there had been more time. If Koyne could have completed the change into Rei, then it would have been enough to fool the auto-senses of the machines, long enough to reach the extraction point and exfiltrate. Rei and the actress would have been found days later, along with all the evidence that Koyne had prepared to set the scene for a murder-suicide shared by a pair of doomed lovers. It had a neatly theatrical tone that would have played well to Saros Station’s intelligentsia.
All that was wasted now, though. Koyne limped away, pain burning from a glancing laser burn in the leg. The Callidus looked like an unfinished model in pinkish-grey clay, caught halfway between the neutral self-template and the form of the Mech-Lord.
There was a cluster of revellers coming the other way, and Koyne made for them, fixing the nearest with a hard gaze and imagining their identity as the assassin’s own. The Callidus heard the heavy stomp of the spindly Crusader robots as they scrambled in pursuit, chattering to one another in machine code.
The small crowd reacted to the new arrival, the merriment of the group dipping for a moment in collective confusion. Koyne pressed every grain of mental control into adopting the face of the civilian – or at least something like it – and swung into the mass of the group.
The robots stood firm and blocked the avenue, guns up, the faceted eyes of their sensor modules sweeping the crowd. The revellers lost some of their good humour as the threat inherent in the maniple of machines became clear.
Koyne knew what would happen next; it was inevitable, but at least the hesitation would buy the assassin time. The Callidus searched for and found a side corridor that led towards an observation cupola, and began pushing through the people towards it.
This was the moment when the machines opened fire on the crowd. Unable to positively identify their target among the group of people, yet certain that their master’s murderer was in that mass, the Crusaders made the logical choice. Kill them all and leave no doubt.
Koyne ran through the screaming, panicking civilians, laser bolts ripping through the air, cutting them down. The assassin vaulted into the corridor and ran to the dead end of it. Red light from the giant Jovian storm seeped in through the observation window, making everything blurry and drenched in crimson.
Time, again. Little enough time. The Callidus concentrated and retched, opening a secondary stomach to vomit up a packet of white, doughy material. With shaking hands, Koyne ripped open the thin membrane sheathing it and allowed air to touch the pasty brick inside. It immediately began to blacken and melt, and quickly the assassin pressed it to the glassaic of the cupola.
The robots were still coming. The shooting had stopped and the Crusaders were advancing down the corridor. Koyne saw the shadows of them jumping on the curved walls, lurching closer.
The assassin sat down in the middle of the room and drew up into a foetal ball, forgetting the face of the civilian, forgetting Gergerra Rei and the Queen Jocasta, remembering instead something old. Koyne let the polymorphine soften flesh into waxen slurry, let it flow and harden into something that resembled the chitin of an insect. Air was expunged, organs pressed together. By turns the body became a mass of dark meat; but still not quickly enough.
The Crusader maniple advanced into the observation cupola just as the package of thermo-reactive plasma completed its oxygenation cycle and self-detonated. The blast shattered the glassaic dome and everything inside the cupola was blown out into space. Rei’s guardian machines spun away into the vacuum even as safety hatches fell to seal off the corridor. Koyne’s body, now enveloped in a cocoon of its own skin, went with them into the dark.
Outside, the Ultio hove closer.
SEVEN
Storm Warning / An Old Wound / Target
Yosef Sabrat was out of his depth.
The audience chamber was big enough that it would have swallowed the footprint of his home three times over, and decorated with such riches that they likely equalled the price of every other house in the same district put together. It was a gallery of ornaments and treasures from all across the southern reaches of the Ultima Segmentum – discreet holographs labelled sculptures from Delta Tao and Pavonis, tapestries and threadwork from Ultramar, art from the colonies of the Eastern Fringes, triptychs of stunning picts in silver frames, glass and gold and steel and bronze… The contents of this one chamber alone shamed even the most resplendent of museums on Iesta Veracrux.