He raised the gun, shaking, his blood turning to ice. Hands tightening on the grip, aiming for the head. In his time, Hyssos had seen many things that defied easy explanation – strange forms of alien life, the impossible vistas of warp space, the darkest potentials of the human character – and this creature was first among them. If hell was a place, then this was something that had been torn out of that infernal realm and thrust into the real world.
Spear raised its sword-arms and rattled their hard surfaces off one another. ‘One more,’ it intoned. ‘One step closer.’
‘To what?’ The question was a gasp. It came at him again, and Hyssos shot it in the face.
Spear shrugged it off. The first downward slash cut away Hyssos’s right hand across the forearm, the gun falling with it. The second stabbing motion pierced skin, ribcage and lung before emerging from his back in a splatter of dark arterial crimson.
Hyssos was not quite dead as Spear began to cut him into pieces. His last awareness was of the sound of his own flesh being eaten.
Shots and cries of pain sounded distantly as they drew closer to the engagement. The crackling drone of an emplaced autocannon sounded every few moments from down in the open plaza.
They had found plenty of dead along the way, and to begin with the Eversor paused at the sight of each clash, looking around to see if any of the combatants had perished carrying weapons of any particular note. But he found nothing he wanted to salvage, all of it basic Nire-pattern stubbers and the occasional lasgun. The Garantine didn’t like lasers; too fragile, too lightweight, too prone to malfunction when worked hard. He liked the heavy certainty of a ballistic gun, the comforting shock of recoil when it fired, the deep bass note of the shells crashing from the muzzle or the whickering sizzle of needle rounds. The bulky combi-weapon in his mailed fist was a perfect fit; it was his intention rendered in gunmetal.
Crouching in the lee of a tall, broken terracotta urn, he studied the Executor pistol and worked his fingers around the grip. The desire to use it on some target, any target, was almost too much to hold in. The anticipation tingled in his lobo-chips, and he felt the chemoglands in his neck grow cool as they produced a calmative to regulate the hammering pace of his heartbeat.
‘Eversor.’ The sniper’s voice issued out from the earpiece of his skull-mask. ‘There’s a group of irregulars to the south, under the broken chronograph near the monorail entrance. They’re dug in with a heavy gun.’ The Garantine took a look around the urn and saw the shattered clock face. He grunted an affirmative and Kell went on. ‘They’re holding off a unit of Defence Force troopers. Not many of the PDFs left. Hold and observe.’
That last sentence actually drew a laugh from the Eversor. ‘Oh, no.’ He jumped to his feet, the hissing of stimjectors sounding in his ears, and rolling fire flooded through him. The Garantine’s eyes widened behind his mask and his body resonated like a struck chord. Kell was saying something over the vox, but it seemed like the chattering of an insect.
The Garantine leapt into the air from the balcony overlooking the ticketing plaza and fell two storeys to land on the top of the smashed clock, where it hung from spars extending from the ceiling. The weight of his arrival dislodged the whole construction and he dropped with it, riding it to the tiled floor below to land behind the makeshift gun emplacement. The clock exploded into fragments as it struck the ground, ejecting cogwheels and bits of the fascia in all directions, the shock of it staggering the men behind the autocannon.
Kell had called them irregulars; that meant they were not soldiers, at least in an official sense. His drug-sharpened perception took in all details of them at once. They were garbed in pieces of armour, some of it PDF or Arbites issue, and the weapons they carried were an equally random assortment. At the sight of the towering, skull-masked monster that had fallen from the skies above them, the men on the autocannon hauled the weapon around on its tripod, swinging it to bear on the Garantine.
He roared and threw himself at them, his shout lost in the scream of the Executor. Bolt shells broke the bodies of the men in wet, red bursts, and he fell into their line, raking others with the spines of his neuro-gauntlet. The barbs of the glove bit into flesh and sent those it touched reeling to a twitching, frenzied death. Those on the autocannon he killed by punching, putting his fist through their ribcages. As an afterthought, he kicked the tripod gun away, and it rolled to the tiled floor.
Shivering with the rush, he laughed again. Through his adrenaline haze, he saw the men in the PDF uniforms warily peer out of cover, and then finally advance towards him with laser carbines ready.
He gave a theatrical bow and addressed them. ‘A rescue,’ he snapped. ‘Consider it a gift from the ruler of Terra.’
‘Idiot.’ Kell’s words pierced the veil of his racing thoughts. ‘Look at their chest plates!’
He did so; all of the PDF soldiers wore the etched-out aquila that signified their rejection of the Emperor’s dominion. They started firing, and the Garantine laughed once more, diving into the beam salvo with the Executor at his lead.
Spear’s meal was methodical. All the eating of the human foodstuffs while it had been in quietus had been enough to fuel the camouflage aspect’s biology, but the layers of the killer’s true self were starting to starve. Sipping at the meat of the dockworker and the clerk had served to hold off the hunger pangs, but they had not been enough for true satisfaction; and the destruction of the telepath had taken a lot of energy from him.
Still; feeding now, and a full meal with it. Bones ground between razor teeth, organs still hot and wet bitten into like ripe fruits, and blood by the bucket for the drinking. Thirst slaked, for a while. Yes. It would do.
Deep in the canyons of his mind, Spear could hear the echo of the camouflage’s ghost-mind as it wept and screamed, forced to watch these deeds from the cage where it was held. It could not understand that it was only noise now, no longer a being with life and power to influence the outside world. For as long as Spear remained in control, it would always be so.
Yosef Sabrat was only the last in a long line of coatings painted over Spear’s malleable aspect, like a dye poured on silk. The killer’s flesh, infused with the living skin of a warp-predator, was more daemon than man and it obeyed no laws of the conventional universe. It was a shape with no shape, but not like those human fools who used chemical philtres to manipulate their skin and bone and think themselves clever. What Spear was went beyond the nature of disguise, beyond transformation. There was a word for it that the ancient banned theologies used to talk of their deities taking on human form; they called it assumption.
When he was sated, he gathered what remained of Hyssos and cautiously filled a barrel with the leavings. The operative’s clothing and gear he had stripped with care, placing it to one side for later use. The corpse-meat would be hurled from the roof of the winestock, where it would fall to the floor of the narrow crags far below, and into the rapids that would wash the leftovers out to sea; but first he had the final steps to perform.
From one of the giant tanks given over to the maturation of the wines, Spear dragged out a fleshy egg and used his teeth to open it. Foul gases discharged from within and a naked man dropped out on to the wooden flooring. The sac had grown from a seed Spear planted in the lung of a homeless drunkard shortly after arriving on Iesta Veracrux. Conjured by the sorcery of his masters, the seed consumed the vagrant to make the egg, giving birth to a stasis caul where Spear had been able to store Yosef Sabrat’s body for the past two months.