‘Your powers of perception are as sharp as ever.’
‘How long can we afford to wait?’ he replied. ‘We’re very close to the deployment time as it is.’
‘They’ll be here,’ Kell said, just as something shimmered in the downpour beyond the open hangar doors.
‘I am,’ said Iota, emerging from the grey rain. Her voice had a strange, echoing timbre inside her skull-helmet. She removed the weapon helm as she stepped into cover, and shook loose the thin threads of her braided hair. ‘I was delayed.’
‘By what?’ Tariel demanded. ‘There’s nobody out there.’
‘Nobody out there now,’ Iota gently corrected.
‘Where’s the Venenum?’ said Kell, his jaw stiffening.
Iota glanced at him. ‘Your sister isn’t coming.’
Kell’s eyes flashed with shock and annoyance. ‘How–?’
Tariel held up his hands in a gesture of self-protection. ‘Don’t look at me. I said nothing!’
The Vindicare grimaced. ‘Never mind. That’s not important. Explain yourself. What do you mean, she’s not coming?’
‘Jenniker has taken on a mission of greater personal importance than this one,’ the Culexus told him.
‘I gave her an order!’ he barked, his ire rising by the second.
‘Yes, you did. And she disobeyed it.’
Kell grabbed the other assassin by the collar and glared at her. He felt the black shadow of the pariah’s soul-shrivelling aura rise off her in a wave, but he was too furious to care. ‘You saw her go, didn’t you? You saw her go and you did nothing to stop it!’
A flicker of emotion crossed Iota’s face, but it was difficult to know what it was. Her dark eyes became solid orbs of void. ‘You will not touch me.’
Kell’s skin tingled and his hand went ice-cold, as if it had been plunged into freezing water. Reflexively he let the Culexus go and his fingers contracted in pain. ‘What were you thinking, girl?’ he demanded.
‘You don’t own her,’ Iota said, in a low voice. ‘You gave up your part in her life.’
The comment came out of nowhere, and Kell was actually startled by it. ‘I… This is about the mission,’ he went on, recovering swiftly. ‘Not about her.’
‘You tell yourself that and you pretend to believe it.’ Iota straightened up and stepped around him.
He turned; at the top of the ramp Tariel had been joined by the Garantine, the Eversor rocking back and forth, his massive hands clenching and unclenching with barely-restrained energy. A middle-aged man in PDF-issue rain slicker stood nearby, toying with a poison knife. The expression of the face that Koyne had borrowed was wrong, ill-fitting in some way that Kell could not express.
‘How much longer?’ snarled the Eversor. ‘I want to kill an Astartes. I want to see how it feels.’ His jittery fingers played with the straps of his skull-mask, and the pupils of his bloodshot eyes were black pinpricks.
Kell made a decision and stepped after the Culexus. ‘Iota. Do you know where she went?’
‘I have an inkling,’ came the reply.
‘Find Soalm. Bring her back.’
‘Now?’ said Tariel, his face falling. ‘Now, of all times?’
‘Do it!’ Kell insisted. ‘If she has been compromised, then our entire mission is blown.’
‘That’s not the reason why,’ said Iota. ‘But we can tell her it is, if you wish.’
The Vindicare pointed back out into the rains, which had begun to grow worse. ‘Just go.’ He looked away. There was something in his chest, something there he had thought long since vanished. An emptiness. A regret. He smothered it before it could take hold, turning it to anger. Damn her for bringing these feelings back to the surface! She was part of a past he had left behind, and he wanted it to remain that way. And yet…
Iota gave him a nod and her helmet rose to cover her face. Without looking back, she broke into a run and was quickly swallowed up by the deluge.
The Garantine came stomping down the ramp, seething. ‘What are you doing, sniper?’ He spat the words at him. ‘That gutless poisoner flees the field and you make things worse by sending the witch away as well? Are you mad?’
‘Is the notorious Garantine actually admitting he needs the help of women?’ said Koyne, in the troop commander’s voice. ‘Wonders never cease.’
The Eversor rage-killer loomed over the Vindicare. ‘You’re not fit to lead this unit, you never were. You’re weak! And now your lack of leadership is compromising us all!’
‘You understand nothing,’ Kell snarled back.
A steel-taloned finger pressed on his chest. ‘You know what’s wrong with your clade, Kell? You’re afraid to get the blood on you. You’re scared of the stink of it, you want things all neat and clean, dealt with at arm’s length.’ The Garantine jerked a thumb at Koyne. ‘Even that sexless freak is better than you!’
‘Charming,’ muttered the Callidus.
The Eversor went on, hissing out each word in pops of spittle through bared teeth. ‘Valdor must have been making sport when he put you in charge of this mission! Do you think we’re all blind to the way you look at that Venenum bitch?’
In an instant, Kell’s Exitus pistol was in his hands and then the muzzle of it was buried in the exposed flesh of the Garantine’s throat, pressing into the stressed muscles and taut veins.
‘Kell!’ Tariel called out a warning. ‘Don’t!’
The Eversor laughed. ‘Go on, sniper. Do it. Up close and personal, for the first time in your life.’ His clawed hands came up and he rammed the gun into the thick flesh beneath his jaw. ‘Prove you have some backbone! Do it!’
For a second Kell’s finger tightened on the trigger; but to murder an Eversor rage-killer at point-blank range would be suicidal. The gene-modifications deep inside the Garantine’s flesh contained within them a critical failsafe system that would, should the assassin’s heart ever stop, create a combustive bio-meltdown powerful enough to destroy everything close at hand.
Instead, Kell put all his effort into a vicious shove that propelled the Garantine away. ‘If I didn’t need you,’ he growled, ‘I’d blow a hole in your spine and leave you crippled and bleeding out.’
The Eversor sniggered. ‘You just made my argument for me.’
‘This is pointless,’ snapped Koyne, striding down the ramp. ‘No mission plan ever works as it should. Every one of us knows that. We can complete the assignment without the women. The primary target is still within our reach.’
‘The Callidus is correct,’ added Tariel, working his cogitator. ‘I’m reconfiguring the protocols now. There are overlapping attack vectors. We can still operate with two losses.’
‘As long as no one else walks off,’ said the Garantine. ‘As long as nothing else changes.’
Kell’s face twisted in a grimace. ‘We’re wasting time,’ he said, turning away. ‘Secure the Ultio and move out to your kill-points.’
The man’s name was Tros, and he didn’t talk much. He led Soalm out of the caverns through a vaulted hall of rock that had once held fuel rods for Dagonet’s long-dead atmosphere converters, and to a waiting GEV skimmer.
Once they were on their way out into the wilds, the noise of the hovercraft’s engines made conversation problematic at best. The assassin decided to sit back behind the rebel and let him drive.
The skimmer was fast. They wound through the canyons of the Bladecut at breakneck speed, and then suddenly the wall of rock dropped away around them, falling into the ochre desert. As storm clouds rolled in above them from the west, they went deeper and deeper into the wilderness. From time to time, Soalm saw what might have been the remains of abandoned settlements; they dated back to the early colonist decades, back to when this desert had been fertile arable land. That had been in Dagonet’s green phase, before the human-altered atmosphere had changed again, shifting the good climate northwards. The population had moved with it, leaving only the shells of their former homes lying like broken, scattered tombstones.