A few metres down the alley, the Garantine was sitting atop a waste container, shivering with the come-down from his reflex-boosters, working with a field kit to close up the various wounds the Son of Horus had inflicted on him during the earlier melee. Koyne grimaced at the chewing sound of a dermal stapler as it knitted flesh back to flesh.
The Garantine looked up; his mask was off, and one of his eyes was torn and damaged, weeping clear fluids. He grinned, showing bloodstained teeth. ‘Be with you in a trice, freak.’
Koyne ignored the insult, shrugging off the ragged remains of the PDF troop commander tunic and replacing it with a brocade jacket stolen from a fallen shop-window dummy. ‘May not have that long.’
The Callidus shrank back against the wall and let the face of the portly PDF officer slip away. It was painful to make a change like this, without proper meditation and time spent, but the circumstances demanded it. Koyne’s aspect flowed to resemble that of a young man, a boyish face under the same unruly mop of thin hair.
‘Do you remember what you used to look like?’ said the Eversor, disgust thick in his tone.
Koyne gave the other assassin a sideways look, making a point of gazing at the topography of scarification and the countless implants both atop and beneath his epidermis. ‘Do you?’
The Garantine chuckled. ‘We’re both so pretty in our own ways.’ He went back to his wounds. ‘Any sign of more Astartes?’
The Callidus made a negative noise. ‘But they’ll be coming. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. They march through a city, putting the torch to everything they pass, daring anyone to stop them.’
‘Let them come,’ he grunted, tying the last field dressing around his thick thigh.
‘There will be more than one next time.’
‘Don’t doubt it.’ The Eversor’s hands were still twitching. ‘The poisoner girl was right. We’re all going to die here.’
That drew a harsh look from the Callidus. ‘I have no intention of ending my life on this backwater world.’
He chuckled. ‘Act like you have a choice.’ The Garantine made a metronome motion with his fingers. ‘Ticky-tocky. Odds are against us. Someone must’ve talked.’
That made the other assassin fall silent. Koyne had not wanted to dwell on the possibility, but the Garantine was right to suspect that their mission had been compromised. It seemed a logical deduction, given what had happened in the plaza.
The sharp cry of an animal drew Koyne’s attention away from such troubling thoughts and the assassin looked up to see a raptor bird flutter past the end of the alleyway, pivoting on a wing to glide in their direction.
There was a flurry of movement and the Eversor had his Executor aimed upward, the sensor mast of his Sentinel gear drawing a bead; the combi-weapon’s needler made a snapping sound and the bird died in mid-turn, falling to the ground like a stone.
Koyne went to the animal’s body; there had been something odd about it, a flicker of sunlight off metal…
‘Hungry, are you?’ The Garantine lurched along behind, limping slightly.
‘Idiot.’ Koyne held up the bird’s corpse; a single needle-dart bisected its bloody torso. The raptor had numerous augmetic implants in its skull and pinions. ‘This is a psyber eagle. It belongs to the infocyte. He’s looking for us.’ Koyne glanced up at the streetscreen once more, and the imagers beneath it.
‘Maybe it was him who talked,’ muttered the Eversor. ‘Maybe you.’
The image on the streetscreen flickered and changed; now it was an aerial view of the street, then shots of the alleyway, then a confused tumble of motion. Koyne suddenly understood the display was showing a replay of the visual feed from the eagle’s auto-senses.
Some of the refugee stragglers saw the same thing and stopped to watch the loop of footage. Koyne tossed the dead bird aside and stepped out into the street. Immediately, all the imagers along the bottom of the streetscreen whirred, moving to capture a look at the Callidus.
For a moment nothing happened; if Koyne was right, if it was Tariel watching through those lenses, the Vanus would be confused. Koyne’s face was different from the last one the infocyte had seen. But then the Garantine shuffled out into the open and all doubt was removed.
The refugees saw the hulking rage-killer and backed away in fear, as if suddenly becoming aware of a wild animal in their midst. In that, Koyne reflected, they were almost correct. The Garantine leered at them, showing his teeth.
A hooter sounded from the monorail halt, and in juddering fits and starts, the heavy metal gate closing off the station from the street began to draw open on automated mechanisms. The screen above flickered again, and this time the text displayed there announced that the rail system was now in operation.
Koyne smiled slightly. ‘I think we have some transport.’ The Callidus took a step, but a clawed hand grabbed the assassin’s arm.
‘Could be a trap,’ hissed the Garantine.
In the distance, another orbital strike screamed into the earth and sent a tremor through the ground beneath their feet. ‘Only one way to find out.’
On the elevated platform above the street level a single train was active. The web of monorail lines had been inert ever since the start of the insurrection against Terra, first shut down by the clanner troops as a way of imposing order by restricting the movement of the commoners through the city, and later forced to stay idle because of the mass breakout at the Terminus. But some lines were still connected to what remained of the capital’s rapidly-dying power grid, and the autonomic control systems that governed the operation of the trains and lines and points were simplistic devices; they were no match for someone with the skills of a Vanus.
Another psyber eagle roosted on the prow of the train and it called out a strident caw as Koyne and the Garantine sprinted on to the platform. The Callidus threw a glance down the wide stairwell; some of the bolder refugees were venturing inside the station after them.
‘Quickly,’ Koyne found an open carriage door and climbed inside. The train was a cargo carrier, partitioned off inside by pens suitable for livestock. The air within was thick with the stink of animal sweat and faeces.
As the Garantine climbed in, the eagle took wing and the train shunted forwards with a grinding clatter, sending sparks flying from the drive wheels gripping the rail. Ozone crackled and the carriages lurched away from the station, picking up momentum.
The train rattled along, a dull impact resonating off the metalwork as it shouldered a piece of fallen masonry off the rails. Koyne drew the neural shredder and moved back through the cargo wagon, kicking open the hatch to the next carriage, and then the two more beyond that. In the rear car the shade found the corpses of groxes, the bovines lying where they had fallen on the gridded metal flooring. They were still tethered to anchoring rings on the walls, doubtless forgotten and left to starve in this reeking metal box after the fighting had begun.
Satisfied they were alone, the Callidus walked back the length of the train to find the Garantine in the stubby engine car, watching the chattering cogitator-driver. Through the broken glass of the engine compartment canopy, the elevated track was visible ahead, dropping away down to the level of one of the main boulevards, paralleling the radial highway’s course.
‘If we’re lucky, we can ride this heap all the way out of the city,’ said Koyne, absently examining the charge glyph on the neural weapon.
The Eversor had his fang-mask back on, and he was growling softly with each breath, peering into the distance like a predator smelling the wind. ‘We’re not lucky,’ he retorted. ‘Do you see?’ The Garantine pointed a metal-taloned finger ahead of the train.