As the sac dissolved into vapour, he dressed Sabrat in the clothes he had worn while the aspect had been at the fore. The caul had done its work. The dead reeve looked as if he had been freshly killed; no human means of detection would say otherwise. The stab wound through the man’s heart began to bleed again, and Spear artfully arranged the body, finding the harvesting knife in a flesh pocket and applying it to the wound.
He paused to ensure that the puncture on the roof of Sabrat’s mouth was not visible. The iron-hard proboscis that penetrated there had licked at the matter of the lawman’s brain and siphoned off the chains of chemicals that were his memories, his persona. Then, Spear’s daemonskin had patterned itself on those markers, shifting and becoming. The change was so strong, so deep, that when Spear surrendered control to it, the camouflage aspect was not merely a mask that the murderer wore; it was a living, breathing identity. A persona so perfect that it believed itself to be real, resilient enough that even a cursory psionic scan would not see the lie of it.
Still, it had made sense to murder the psyker woman as soon as possible, if not only to protect the truth but also to force the hand of the investigators. Now the next phase was complete, and the Yosef Sabrat identity had played its role flawlessly. Soon Spear would begin the purgation of the disguise, and finally be rid of the man’s irritatingly moral thought processes, his disgustingly soft compassion, the sickening attachment to his colleagues, brood-child and bed partner. From this point on, Spear would only wear a face, and never again give himself over to another man’s self. He was almost giddy with anticipation. Just a few more steps, and he would be within striking distance of his target.
The murderer knelt next to Hyssos’s head, severed at the neck by a slicing cut, and gathered it up. With a guttural choke, Spear spat the proboscis from the soft palate of his mouth and into the skull through its right eye. Seeking, penetrating, it dug deep and found the regions of the dead man’s brain where his self was growing cold.
Spear drank him in.
Koyne put away the monocular and hid it inside a pocket of the officer’s tunic the infocyte had recovered from one of the airfield’s dead. It fit snugly, but the adjustment of the fluid-filled morphing bladders layered underneath the Callidus’s skin allowed the assassin to alter body mass and dimension to accommodate it a little better.
‘How do you propose we get inside?’ said Iota. The Culexus was almost invisible in the shadows by the broken window, with only the steel-grey curve of her grinning helmet visible in the moonlight. Her voice had a peculiar, metallic timbre to it when she spoke from inside the psyker-hood, as if it were coming to Koyne’s ears from a very great distance.
‘Through the front door.’ The Callidus watched the men walking back and forth in front of the communicatory, considering the cautious motions in their steps, analysing the cues of their body language not just for infiltration’s sake, but to parse their states of mind. Data-slates, recovered from what remained of the corpses of the turncoat patrol murdered by the Garantine, had provided the Execution Force with a lead on this facility. It was the nearest thing to a garrison for kilometres around, and at this stage Kell wasn’t ready to send the group out from the relative safety of the Ultio and down the long highway to the capital city, several kilometres to the south. The metropolis itself, the largest of all on Dagonet, could be seen clearly against the darkening sky. Some of the taller towers were still smoking, some had half-collapsed and fallen like drunkards suspended on each other’s shoulders; but no snakes of tracer lashed at the skies, there were no mushroom clouds or flights of assault craft buzzing overhead. It seemed calm, or at least as calm as a city on a world at war with itself had any right to be.
When Koyne had asked the Vindicare what he had learned on his scouting mission, the Eversor had just grinned and the sniper replied with a terse dismissal. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
Koyne did not doubt that. The Callidus had learned through many hundreds of field operations, a lot of them in active zones of conflict, that what generals in their places of comfort and control called ‘ground truth’ was often anything but true. For the soldier as much as the assassin, the only equation of truth that always worked was the simple vector between a weapon and a target. But now they were here, Koyne and the pariah girl Iota, the Culexus’s skin-crawling null ability brought along to protect the shade from any possible psionic interception.
‘Tariel was correct in his evaluation,’ said Iota, as a rotorplane chattered past overhead. ‘There is an astropath inside that building.’
‘Is it aware of you?’
She shook her head, the distended skull-helm moving back and forth. ‘No. I think it may be under the influence of chemical restraints.’
‘Good.’ Koyne stood up. ‘We don’t want the alarm to be raised before we are done here.’ Concentrating on a thought-shape and impressing that on flesh, the Callidus altered the dimension of its vocal chords, mimicking the tonality of an officer caught on one of the intercepted vox broadcasts. ‘We will proceed.’
The shapeshifter was as good as its word.
Keeping to the shadows and the low rooftops along the star-port’s blockhouses, Iota followed the Callidus and watched Koyne become a simulacrum of a turncoat PDF commander, advancing through the outer guard post of the communicatory without raising even a moment of concern. At one point, Iota lost sight of the Callidus, and when a man in Dagoneti colours approached her hiding place, she made ready the combi-needler about the wrist of her killing hand in order to silently end him.
‘Iota,’ called an entirely different voice. ‘Show yourself.’
She stepped into the light. ‘I like your tricks,’ said Iota.
Koyne smiled with someone else’s face and opened a door. ‘This way. I relieved the guards at the elevator in here so we won’t have much time. They’re holding the astropath on one of the sublevels.’
‘Why did you change it?’ Iota asked as they moved through the ill-lit corridors. ‘The face?’
‘I bore easily,’ replied Koyne, halting at a lift shaft. ‘Here we are.’
As the Callidus reached for the switch, the doors opened, flooding the corridor with light; inside the elevator two troopers saw the dark shape of the Culexus and went for their guns.
Spear swallowed Hyssos’s one undamaged eye before depositing the dead man’s reamed head among the rest of him; and then with a swift spin of his body, he pitched the remains into the canyon and watched them fall away.
Returning to the tank room, he skirted the beauty of the blood-art he had made from Erno Sigg’s corpse. He had used poor Erno as his stalking horse, tormenting him, pushing him to the edge of sanity before destroying him. The man had served his purpose perfectly. Spear moved on, checking once more that the body of Yosef Sabrat had been arranged just so. The evidence he had fabricated over the past few weeks was also scattered around, arranged so that when it was discovered, it would lead the investigators of the Sentine towards one undeniable conclusion – the killer of Jaared Norte, Cirsun Latigue, Perrig and Sigg and the rest of them was none other than their fellow lawman.
He made a mock-solemn expression with the new face he wore, trying the look on for size; but he had no mirror to see how it seemed on his new guise. Spear pawed at a face that now resembled that of the Eurotas operative. It felt odd and incomplete. The churn of new memories and personality sucked in from Hyssos was curdling where it mixed with those of Sabrat, making him thought-sick. It seemed it would be necessary to purge the stolid reeve’s self sooner rather than later.