Every second he was awake, he felt as if the pure rage that fuelled him was being siphoned away, making him weak and soft. He needed his sleep. Needed it like air.
But he needed his kills even more. Better than the hardest hit of combat philtre, more potent than the jags of pleasure-analogue that issued from the lobo-chips in his grey matter – the kills were the best high of them all.
He was pounding on the Space Marine’s helmet, smashing in the eye-lenses, beating his clawed hands bloody. The Executor was a club he used to bludgeon and swipe.
Impacts registered on him, blasts of infernal heat throwing him off his victim, driving him hard into the road. Heavy, drug-tainted vitae frothed at his mouth and bubbled through the maw of the fang-mask. He felt no pain. There was only a white ball of warmth in the middle of him, and it was growing. It expanded to fill the Garantine with a rush the like of which he had never felt before. The implants in him stuttered and died, shattered by glancing bolter hits and knife stabs. He had nothing but rags below the right knee.
Every muscle in his body shuddered as the death-sign triggered a dormant artificial gland beneath his sternum. The engorged, orb-shaped organ spent its venom load, bursting as the end came close. The Terminus gland poured a compound into the Garantine that made the blood in his veins boil, turning it to acid. Every drug and chemical mixed uncontrollably, becoming potent, toxic, explosive.
The soft tissues of the Eversor’s eyes cooked in their orbits, and so he was blind to the final flash of exothermic release, as his body was consumed in an inferno of spontaneous combustion.
They hugged the contours of the city streets, moving fast and as low as they dared, but out on the edge of the capital the Sons of Horus had little presence. Instead, the rebel Astartes had allowed their orbital contingent to hammer at the walled estates and parklands belonging to the noble clans. The city was now ringed with a dirty chain of massive impact craters. The blackened bowls of churned earth were fused into glassy puddles in some places, where the force of the kinetic strikes had melted the ground into distended fulgurite plates.
The lines of refugees crossed the craters beneath them, streamers of people moving like ants across the footprint of an uncaring giant. The thick, smoke-soiled air over the destruction veiled the passage of the flyer. Tariel told them they were fortunate that the Adeptus Astartes had not deployed air cover; in this wallowing, keening civilian aircraft they would have been no match for a Raven interceptor.
On Kell’s orders the infocyte directed the flyer out over the wastelands beyond the city walls and into the dusty churn of the deserts. With each passing second they were putting more and more distance between them and the star-port hangar where the Ultio had been concealed.
Nothing followed them; at one point the sensors registered something small and fast – a jetbike perhaps – but it was far off their vector and did not appear to be aware of them.
Finally, Koyne broke the silence. ‘Where in the name of Hades are we going?’
‘To find the others,’ said the Vindicare.
‘The women?’ Koyne was still hiding behind a young man’s face and the expression the Callidus put on it was too old and too callous for such a youthful visage. ‘What makes you think they’re any less dead than the Eversor?’
Kell held up a data-slate. ‘You don’t really think I’d let the Culexus out of my sight without knowing exactly where she was, do you?’
‘A tracking device?’ Koyne immediately glared at Tariel, who shrank back behind the hologram of the flyer’s autopilot control. ‘One of your little toys?’
The infocyte gave a brisk nod. ‘A harmless radiation frequency tag, nothing more. I provided enough for all of us.’
Koyne turned the glare back on Kell. ‘Did you plant one on me as well?’ The boy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where is it?’
Kell smiled coldly. ‘Those rations aboard the Ultio were tasty, weren’t they?’ Before the Callidus could react, he went on. ‘Don’t be so difficult, Koyne. If I hadn’t factored in a contingency, we never would have found you. You’d still be in the city, marking time until Horus’s warriors cut you down.’
‘You thought of everything,’ said the shade. ‘Except the possibility that our target would know we were coming!’
Tariel began to speak. ‘The target in the plaza–’
‘Was not the Warmaster!’ snarled Koyne. ‘I am an assassin palatine of more kills than I care to mention, and I have survived every sanction and prosecuted each kill because I had no secrets. No one to confide in. No chance for a breach in operational security. And yet here we are, with this grand and foolish scheme to murder a primarch crashing down around us, and for what? Who spoke, Kell?’ The Callidus crossed the flyer’s small cabin and prodded the marksman in the chest. ‘Who is to blame?’
‘I don’t have an answer for you,’ said Kell, in a moment of candour. ‘But if any of us were traitors to the Emperor, we’ve had opportunities aplenty to stop this endeavour before it even left the Sol system.’
‘Then how did Horus foresee the attack?’ asked Koyne. ‘He let one of his own commanders perish in his stead. He must have known! Are we to believe he’s some kind of sorcerer?’
A chime sounded from Kell’s data-slate, and he left the question unanswered. ‘A return. Two kilometres to the west.’
Tariel opened another pane of ghostly hololithic images and nodded. ‘I have it. A static location. The flyer’s auspex is detecting a metallic mass… conflicting thermal reads.’
‘Set us down.’
Below them, dust clouds whirled past, reducing visibility to almost nothing. ‘The sandstorm and the contaminants from the orbital bombing…’ The Vanus looked up and his argument died on his lips as he saw Kell’s rigid expression. He sighed. ‘As you wish.’
Two of Tariel’s eyerats found her, slumped over the yoke of a GEV skimmer half-buried under a storm-blown dune. From what the infocyte could determine, she had been injured before getting into the vehicle, and at some point as she tried to escape into the deep desert, her wounds had overcome her and the skimmer controls had slipped from her grip.
Kell, an expression of stony fury on his face, shoved Tariel out of the way and gathered up Soalm where she lay. Her face was discoloured with bruising, and to the infocyte’s amazement, she still lived.
Koyne drew something from the back seat of the GEV: a sculpted silver helmet in the shape of a skull, crested with lenses and antennae of arcane design. When the Callidus held it up to look it in the eye, black ash fell from the neck and was carried away on the moaning winds. ‘Iota…’
‘Dead,’ Soalm stirred at the mention of the psyker’s name. ‘It killed her.’ Her voice was slight, thick with pain.
‘It?’ echoed Tariel; but Kell was already carrying the Venenum back towards the flyer.
Koyne was the last inside, and the Callidus drew the hatch shut with a slam. The shade brought Iota’s helmet back, and sat it on the deck of the cabin. It fixed them all with its mute, accusatory gaze. Outside, the winds threw rattling curls of sand across the canopy, plucking at the wings of the aircraft.
Across the compartment, Kell tore open a medicae pack and emptied the contents across the metal floor. He worked to load an injector with a pan-spectrum anti-infective.