What the others called the ‘staging area’ was really little more than a converted storage bay, and Iota saw little reason why the name of it made so much difference. The Ultio was a strange vessel; she was still trying to know it, and it wasn’t letting her. The ship was one thing pretending to be another, an assemblage of rare technologies and secrets that had been stitched into a single body; given a mission, thrown out into the darkness. It was like her in that way, she mused. They could almost have been kin.
The mind inside the ship spoke to her when she spoke to it, answering some of her questions but not others. Eventually, Iota became bored with the circular conversations and tried to find another way to amuse herself. As a test of her stealth skills, she took to exploring the smallest of the crawlspaces aboard the Ultio or spying on the medicae compartment where the Callidus was recovering inside a therapy pod. When she wasn’t doing this or meditating, Iota spent the time hunting down spiders in shadowed corners of the hull, catching and collecting them in a jar she had appropriated from the ship’s mess. So far, her hopes of encouraging the arachnids to form their own rudimentary society had failed.
She spotted another of the insects in the lee of a console and deftly snared it; then, with a cruelty born of her boredom, she severed its legs one by one, to see if it could still walk without them.
Kell entered the chamber; he was the last to arrive. The infocyte Tariel had been working at the hololith projector and he seemed uncharacteristically muted. The Vanus’s mood had been like this ever since he and the Vindicare had returned from Terra with the last of the recruits, the woman who called herself Soalm. The new arrival didn’t speak much either. She seemed rather delicate for an assassin; that was something that many thought of Iota when they first laid eyes on her, but the chill of her preternatural aura was usually enough to destroy that illusion within a heartbeat. The Garantine’s bulk took up a corner of the room, like an angry canine daring any one of them to crowd into his space. He was playing with a sliver of sharpened metal – the remains of a tool, she believed – dancing the makeshift blade across his thick fingers with a striking degree of dexterity. He was bored too, but annoyed with it; then again, Iota had come to understand that every mood of the Eversor was some shade of anger, to a greater or lesser extent. Koyne sat in a wire-frame chair, the Callidus’s smoothed-flat features like an unfinished carving in soapstone. She watched the shade for a few moments, and Koyne offered Iota a brief smile. The Callidus’s skin darkened, taking on a tone close to the tawny shade of Iota’s own flesh; but then the moment was broken by Kell as he rapped his gloved hand on the support beams of the low ceiling.
‘We’re all here,’ said the Vindicare. His gaze swept the room, dwelling briefly on all of them; all of them except Soalm, she noted. ‘The mission begins now.’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Koyne, in a voice like Iota’s.
Kell nodded to Tariel. ‘It’s time to find out.’
The infocyte activated a code-key sequence on the projector unit and a haze of holographic pixels shimmered into false solidity in the middle of the chamber. They formed into the shape of a tall, muscular man in nondescript robes. He had a scarred face and a queue of close-cut hair over an otherwise bare skull, and if the image was an accurate representation, then he was easily bigger than the Garantine. The hologram crackled and wavered, and Iota recognised the tell-tale patterns of high-level encoding threading through it. This was a real-time transmission, which meant it could only be coming from another ship in orbit, or from Terra itself.
Kell nodded to the man. ‘Captain-General Valdor. We are ready to be briefed, at the Master’s discretion.’
Valdor returned the gesture. ‘The Master of Assassins has charged me with that task. Given the… unique nature of this operation, it seems only right that there be oversight from an outside party.’ The Custodian surveyed all of them with a measuring stare; at his end of the communication, Iota imagined he was standing among a hololithic representation of the room and everyone in it.
‘You want us to kill him, don’t you?’ the Garantine said without preamble, burying his makeshift knife in the bulkhead beside his head. ‘Let’s not be precious about it. We all know, even if we haven’t had the will to say it aloud.’
‘Your insight does you credit, Eversor,’ said Valdor, his tone making it clear his compliment was anything but that. ‘Your target is the former Warmaster of the Adeptus Astartes, Primarch of the Luna Wolves, the Archtraitor Horus Lupercal.’
‘They are the Sons of Horus now,’ muttered Tariel, disbelief sharp in his words. ‘Throne’s sake. It’s true, then…’
The Venenum woman made a negative noise in the back of her throat. ‘If it pleases my lord Custodes, I must question this.’
‘Speak your mind,’ said Valdor.
‘Every clade has heard the rumours of the missions that have followed this directive and failed it. My clade-cohort Tobeld was the last to be sent on this fool’s errand, and he perished like all the others. I question if this can even be achieved.’
‘Cousin Soalm has a compelling point,’ offered Koyne. ‘This is not some wayward warlord of which we are speaking. This is Horus, first among the Emperor’s sons. Many call him the greatest primarch that ever lived.’
‘You’re afraid,’ snorted the Garantine. ‘What a surprise.’
‘Of course I am afraid of Horus,’ replied Koyne, mimicking the Eversor’s gruff manner. ‘Even an animal would be afraid of the Warmaster.’
‘An Execution Force like this one has never been gathered,’ Kell broke in, drawing the attention of all of them. ‘Not since the days of the first masters and the pact they swore in the Emperor’s service on Mount Vengeance. We are the echo of that day, those words, that intention. Horus Lupercal is the only target worthy of us.’
‘Pretty words,’ said Soalm. ‘But meaningless without direction.’ She turned back to the image of Valdor. ‘I say again; how do we hope to accomplish this after so many of our Assassinorum kindred have been sacrificed against so invulnerable an objective?’
‘Horus has legions of loyal warriors surrounding him,’ said Tariel. ‘Astartes, warships, forces of the Mechanicum and Cybernetica, not to mention the common soldiery who have come to his banner. How do we even get close enough to strike at him?’
‘He will come to you.’ Valdor gave a cold, thin smile. ‘Perhaps you wondered at the speed with which this Execution Force has been assembled? It has been done so as to react to new intelligence that will place the traitor directly in your sights.’
‘How?’ demanded Koyne.
‘It is the judgement of Lord Malcador and the Council of Terra that Horus’s assassination at this juncture with throw the traitor forces into disarray and break the rebellion before it can advance on to the Segmentum Solar,’ said Valdor. ‘Agents of the Imperium operating covertly in the Taebian Sector report a strong likelihood that Horus is planning to bring his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, to the planet Dagonet in order to show his flag. We believe that the Warmaster’s forces will use Dagonet as a foothold from which to secure the turning of every planet in the Taebian Stars.’
‘If you know this to be so, my lord, then why not simply send a reprisal fleet to Dagonet instead?’ asked Soalm. ‘Send battle cruisers and Legions of Astartes, not six assassins.’