It was because of that Goeda Rufin was in the office of his commander when the liberation took place. That’s what they were calling it now, ‘The Liberation’, the bloody day of upheaval that left Dagonet declared free of Imperial rule and true to the banner of the Warmaster Horus.
Rufin had been there, waiting, forgotten. He had been there for a disciplinary review – someone had heard him bad-mouthing his superiors one time too many – and if it had just been any other day, he would likely have ended up dismissed from the PDF for his troubles.
But then the shooting started, and he saw soldiers fighting soldiers in the courtyard. Warriors from the palace garrison, their uniforms marred by crossed-out aquila sigils, cutting down all the men he never liked. He was hiding in his commander’s office when the officer came running in, barking orders at him. At his heels were a pair of the palace men, and seeing them, Rufin at last caught up to what was going on. When his commander bellowed at him to come to his aid, Rufin took up the ornamental dagger the man used as a letter opener and stabbed him with it. Later, the leader of the invading troops shook his hand and offered him a marker with which to scratch out his own Imperial emblems.
He got his officer braid because of that, and all the men who surrendered with him took it too, that or the buzz of a las-round to the back of the head. After the dust settled the new regime needed officers to fill the ranks they had culled. Rufin was happy to accept; Emperor or Warmaster, he didn’t give a damn whose name he had to salute. He had no respect for any of them.
Rufin left the motor pool behind. His new command was the ‘emergency circumstances security camp’ established on the site of the capital terminus monorail station. Ever since the nobles had shut down the networks, the passenger trains had lain idle; but now they had a new duty, serving as prison accommodations for the hundreds of civilians and idiot rebels who had dared to defy the new order.
Rufin lorded it over them, walking back and forth across the high gantries above the choked platforms, making sure each inmate knew he held the power of life and death with random beatings and executions. When he wasn’t exercising his dull brutality and boredom on them, Rufin was prowling the ammo stores on the lower levels, in what used to be the maintenance wells for the engines. He liked being down there, among the smells of cordite and gunmetal. It made him feel like a real soldier to be surrounded by all that firepower.
Entering the observation cupola above what was once the station’s central plaza, he caught the watch officer sipping a mug of black tea and gave him a glowering stare. ‘Status?’ he barked.
The officer looked at his chronograph. ‘Check-in at the top of the hour, sir. That’s another quarter-turn away.’ He had barely finished speaking when the intercom grille over their heads crackled into life.
‘Early?’ said Rufin.
‘Control!’ said a panicked voice over the vox. ‘I think… I think there might be a problem.’
‘Post two, say again?’ began the watch officer, but Rufin snatched the handset from him and snarled into it.
‘This is the base commander! Explain yourself!’
‘Recruit Zejja just… Well, he just fell off the south wall. And Tormol isn’t responding to his wireless.’ Then, very distinctly, the open vox channel caught a sound like a quick, low hum, followed a heartbeat later by a wet chug and then the echo of a body falling.
Rufin thrust the handset back at the watch officer, uncertain what to do next. ‘Shall I try to raise the other guard posts now, sir?’ said the other man, stifling a cough.
‘Yes,’ He nodded. That sounded like the right sort of thing. ‘Do that.’
Then, without warning, the old control board left intact from the station’s prior function flickered into life. Lines of colour denoting tracks, blocks of illumination signifying individual carriages, all began to click and chatter as they activated.
Rufin shot a worried look out of the windows of the cupola and heard the mutter of dozens of electric motors coming alive. The sound echoed around the vaulted glass spaces of the station concourse and platforms. Below, the prisoners were scrambling to their feet, energised by the sound. Rufin drew his pistol on impulse and kneaded the grip. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.
The watch officer looked at the consoles before him in surprise. ‘That… That’s not possible,’ he insisted, coughing again. ‘All remote operations of station systems were locked down, the hard lines were severed…’ He swallowed hard, beads of sweat appearing on his high forehead. ‘I think someone is trying to move the trains.’
Below, the ornate copper departure boards for all the platforms began whirring in a rattling chorus of noise, each one flashing up destination after destination. With a sharp report, they all stopped at once, all of them showing the same thing; End Of The Line.
The prisoners saw the words and let out a ragged cheer. Rufin shouted abuse back at them, and caught sight of one of his men running up the platform with a heavy autogun in his grip. The trooper was perhaps twenty metres from the jeering prisoners when his chest exploded in a silent, red blossom, and he fell.
Finally, the correct words registered in his mind. ‘We’re under attack!’
When Rufin turned back to the watch officer, the man was lolling in his chair, eyes and mouth open, staring blankly at the ceiling. He caught a strange, floral smell emanating from the officer and gingerly extended a hand to prod his waxy, damp face. The watch officer slumped forward, knocking his tea glass over. The flower-stink grew stronger as the liquid pooled on the floor.
Rufin’s hand flew to his mouth. ‘Poison!’ Without looking back, he ran to the cupola door and raced away, footsteps banging off the metal gantries.
Spear reached out a hand and rubbed the edge of the ornate tapestry between Hyssos’s thick fingers. The complex depiction on the hanging was of the Emperor, smiting some form of bull-like alien with a gigantic sword made of fire.
He rolled his eyes at the banal pomposity of the thing and stepped away, carelessly brushing fibres of broken thread from his hands. Touching the object was forbidden, but there was nobody here in the audience chamber to see him do it. The killer idly wondered if the residue left by the daemonskin of his flesh-cloak would poison and shrivel the ancient artwork. He hoped it would; the idea of the humans aboard the Iubar running about and panicking as the piece blackened and corroded amused him no end.
He glanced out of the viewing windows as he wandered the length of the chamber. The curve of Iesta Veracrux was slipping away beneath the starship’s keel as it turned for open space, and Spear was not sorry to see it go. He had spent too long on that world, living in the inanities of its civilisation, play-acting at a half-dozen different roles. Since his arrival, Spear had been many faces – among them a vagrant, a storeman, a streetwalker, a jager and a reeve, living the lie of their ridiculous, pointless existences. He had stacked their corpses, and all the others, to make the ladder that led him to where he now stood.
A few more murders. One, perhaps two more assumptions. And then he would be close to the mark. The greatest prey of them all, in fact. A shiver of anticipation rippled through him. Spear was eager, but he reined the emotion in, pushed it down. Now was not the time to be dazzled by the scope of his mission. He had to maintain his focus.
Before, such a slip might have been problematic; he was convinced that such thoughts were how the psyker wench Perrig had been able to gather a vague sense of him down on Iesta. But with her no more than a pile of ashes in a jar in the Iubar’s Chamber of Rest, that threat was gone for the moment. Spear knew from Hyssos’s memories that Baron Eurotas had spent much influence and coin in order to bend the Imperium’s fear-driven rules about the censure of psychics; and given the present condition of the Consortium’s welfare, that would not be repeated. The next time he met a psyker, he would be prepared.