[Horus Heresy 13] - Nemesis Read online

  The Horus Heresy

  NEMESIS

  War within the shadows

  Horus Heresy - 13

  James Swallow

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  For Aaron & Katie—Clear Skies and Good Hunting.

  The Horus Heresy

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade—the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

  Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

  Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

  As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Execution Force

  Eristede Kell — Assassin-at-Marque, Clade Vindicare

  Jenniker Soalm — Secluse, Clade Venenum

  “The Garantine” — Nihilator, Clade Eversor

  Fon Tariel — Infocyte, Clade Vanus

  Koyne — Shade, Clade Callidus

  Iota — Protiphage, Clade Culexus

  Officio Assassinorum

  Master of Assassins — A High Lord of Terra

  Sire Vindicare — Master and Director Primus, Clade Vindicare

  Siress Venenum — Mistress and Director Primus, Clade Venenum

  Sire Eversor — Master and Director Primus, Clade Eversor

  Sire Vanus — Master and Director Primus, Clade Vanus

  Siress Callidus — Mistress and Director Primus, Clade Callidus

  Sire Culexus — Master and Director Primus, Clade Culexus

  Legio Custodes

  Constantin Valdor — Captain-General and Chief Custodian

  The Imperial Fists Legion

  Rogal Dorn — Primarch of the Imperial Fists

  Efried — Third Captain

  The Sons of Horus

  Horus Lupercal — Primarch of the Sons of Horus

  Maloghurst — Equerry to the Primarch

  Luc Sedirae — Captain of the 13th Company

  Devram Korda — Veteran Sergeant, 13th Company

  The Word Bearers Legion

  Erebus — First Chaplain of the Word Bearers

  Imperial Personae

  Malcador — The Sigillite Regent of Terra

  Yosef Sabrat — Reeve of Iesta Veracrux

  Daig Segan — Reeve of Iesta Veracrux

  Berts Laimner — Reeve Warden of Iesta Veracrux

  Rata Telemach — High-Reeve of Iesta Veracrux

  Erno Sigg — Citizen of the Imperium

  Merriksun Eurotas — The Void Baron of Narvaji, Agentia Nuntius (Taebian Sector)

  Hyssos — Security Operative, Eurotas Trade Consortium

  Perrig — Indentured Psyker, Eurotas Trade Consortium

  Capra — Citizen of Dagonet

  Terrik Grohl — Citizen of Dagonet

  Liya Beye — Citizen of Dagonet

  Lady Astrid Sinope — Citizen of Dagonet

  “For those that defy the Imperium, only the Emperor can judge your crimes.

  Only in death can you receive the Emperor’s judgement!”

  —maxim of the Officio Assassinorum

  “The monster boasted of what he would do once he conquered the home of the god-king, little knowing that Nemesis heard his words and took note of them.”

  —excerpted from texts of the ancient Terran poet Nonnus

  “We live in peace and pretend at it. But in truth there are always wars, thundering unseen around us, just beyond the curve of our sight. The greatest foolishness is that no man wishes to know the truth. He is happy to live his life as silent guns cut the sky above his head!”

  —attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy

  PART ONE

  EXECUTION

  ONE

  Object Lesson

  Tactics of Deceit

  The Star

  Gyges Prime was a murdered world, dead now, all but an ashen ember. Around the encampment, porous black rock ranged away under a cowl of low mist, the haze itself the remains of cities pounded into radioactive dust by countless bombardments from orbit. Arsenals of nuclear munitions had been emptied to bring the planet to the executioner’s block, and now the cooling corpse of the world lay swaddled in its own death-shroud, a virulent and silent pall of radiation that smothered everything.

  Here, in the canyon where the invaders had made their planetfall, high walls of shield rock did their best to cut the fiery winds from the shattered landscape. Men, such as the soldiers that had crisped and burned like paper in the onslaught, would have died for the sake of living an hour outside in this nightmare, had any of them survived this long. The invaders had no such weaknesses, however.

  The lethality they laid over Gyges Prime was to them a minor irritant. Once they were done in this place, they would return to their warcraft high above and clean the stink of the dead planet from their robes and armour as one might wash dried mud from a soiled boot. They would do this and think nothing of it. They would not stop to consider that the air now passing into their lungs was laced with the particulate remains of every man, woman and child that had called Gyges Prime home.

  The planet was dead, and it had served a purpose in dying. The dozen other colony worlds of the Gyges system, each of them more valuable, more populous than this one, they would look through their mnemoniscopes and watch this ember cool and fade. Why choose to attack that world and no other? The question they first asked as the warships passed them by had now been answered: for the lesson of it.

  Tobeld did not dwell on this, as he moved around the lee of the temporary pergolas set up beneath the wings of the tethered Stormbirds, hearing the mutter of conversation among the warriors around him amid the snap of guyropes and wind-pulled fabric. Messages were already coming in from the ships in orbit. The other worlds, the orbital platforms, the system defence fleet, all were surrendering. Twelve planets teeming with people, giving up their freedom without a single word of defiance. Lesson learned.

  The taking of the Gyges system had been a swift and almost cursory thing. Doubtless, in decades to come, it would be less than a postscript in the annals of the war. No casualties of note had been taken by the warfleet, none that mattered to the architect of the conflict that this small venture was but a fragment of. Gyges was merely a stone in the path, a path that began in the Isstvan system and wound its way across the galaxy towards Terra. Gyges was a passing footstep, beneath which the blood of millions left no mark. By conventional battle logic, there was no reason for any of the invaders to even step on to the surface; yet still they had come, in this small party, for r
easons that could only be guessed at.

  Tobeld stifled a cough with his hand, pushing the thick robe of his hood to his face to muffle the sound. It came away wet and he tasted copper in his mouth. The radiation had killed him the moment he stepped out from the shuttle, him and the other serfs brought down from the flagship in order to serve the invaders. The serfs would all be dead before sunset. He knew he would share that fate, but it was a price worth paying. In the dimness of his dormitory capsule back on the warship, Tobeld had used a quarter of the elements of his weapons kit to fabricate a strong dosage of counter-radiation drugs; the rest he had turned to the building of the compound that nestled inside the finger-long glass vial strapped to the inside of his wrist. He had done his best to dispose of the remnants of the kit, but he was afraid some trace might still be discovered; and the counter-rads were working poorly. He had little time.

  He passed behind the engine bells of a drop-ship and through the black haze he spied the largest of the tents, a low pavilion made of non-reflective cloth. For a second, the wind snapped at the entrance flap and showed him a glimpse of things inside. He saw what might have been firelight jumping and moving off slabs of polished ceramite armour, and wet shapes like animated falls of blood. Then the breeze passed on and the sight was lost to him. Still, the confusion of impressions made him shiver.

  Tobeld hesitated. He would need to cross open ground to get from the Stormbird to the pavilion, and he could not afford to be challenged. He was entering the terminal stage of his mission now, after so long. There could be no mistakes. No one had come this close before. He could not risk failure.

  Tobeld took a shaky, tainted breath. He had sacrificed a solar year of his life to this mission, breaking out from under a cover he had spent half a decade building as a minor Nobilite clan cook-functionary. He had willingly discarded that carefully-crafted disguise to embrace a new one, such was the gravity of his new mission; and through cautious steps, with doses of poisons both subtle and coarse to smooth his path, Tobeld had made his way into service aboard the battle cruiser Vengeful Spirit, the flagship of Horus Lupercal.

  Two years had passed since the betrayal at Isstvan, the bloody backstabbing that opened the way to Horus’ insurrection against the Imperium and his father, the Emperor of Mankind. In that time, his steady progression across the galaxy had gathered momentum. As this day showed, every system that passed beneath the keel of Horus’ warships either swore fealty to him, or else they burned. Worlds and worlds, united in the aftermath of the Great Crusade, were now torn between loyalty to a distant Earth and an absent Emperor, or to a victorious Horus and his army of warlords. The glimpses Tobeld got from his lower-decks vantage point showed an armada of turncoat-kindred consolidating power degree by punishing degree. Horus closed his steel grip on sector after sector. One did not need to be a tactician to know that the Warmaster was marshalling his energies for the advance that had to come—an eventual thrust towards Terra herself, and to the gates of the Imperial Palace.

  Horus could not be allowed to take that step.

  At first it had seemed an unassailable objective. The Warmaster himself, a primarch, a demigod warrior, and Tobeld just a man. A killer of superlative skill and subtlety, indeed, but still a man. To strike directly at Horus aboard the Spirit would have been madness, an impossibility. Tobeld toiled aboard the flagship for almost five months before he even laid eyes upon the Warmaster—and the being he saw that day was one of such magnitude that it set him reeling, the question hard in his thoughts. How do I kill this one?

  Conventional poisons were worthless ranged against the physiology of an Astartes; they could ingest the harshest of venoms as Tobeld might sip wine. But Tobeld was here precisely because poison was his weapon of choice. It could be swift; it could be patient, escaping detection, lying dormant. He was one of Clade Venenum’s finest tox-artisans; in his apprenticeship he had manufactured killing philtres from the most base of components, he had terminated dozens of targets and left no trace. And he slowly came to believe that he was capable of this, if fate would only grace him with a single opportunity.

  The weapon lay in the vial. Tobeld had created a binary agent, a mixture of molecular accelerant gels suspending a live sample of gene-altered Baalite thirst-water—a virulent fluidic life form that could consume all moisture within living tissues in a matter of seconds. When Horus had announced he would be leading a landing party to the surface of Gyges Prime, Tobeld heard the tolling of fate in the words. His chance. His single chance.

  There was rumour and supposition aboard the Vengeful Spirit, down on the lower decks where the human serfs and servitors toiled. Men spoke of strange things afoot on the levels where the Astartes walked, of changes, of apparitions and peculiarities in parts of the vessel. Tobeld heard whispers of the so-called lodges where these changes took place. He listened to stories of rites made on the surfaces of conquered worlds, things that sickened him as much with their nauseating similarity to crude idolatry as with their hints of inhumanity and horror. The men who spoke of these things often vanished soon after, leaving nothing but fear in their wakes.

  He concentrated on the weapon, listening for the wind to drop. Horus was there, no more than a dozen steps away, inside the pavilion with his inner circle—Maloghurst, Abaddon and the rest of them—engaging in whatever ritual had brought them to this place. Close now, closer than ever before. Tobeld prepared himself, forcing away the pain in his throat, his joints. Entering the command tent, he would introduce the weapon to the jug of wine at Horus’ side, fill the cups of the Warmaster and his senior battle-brothers. One sip would be enough to infect them… and he hoped it would be enough to kill, although Tobeld held no doubt he would not live to see his mission succeed. His faith in his art would have to be enough.

  Time, then. He stepped out from underneath the Stormbird’s wing; and a voice said, “Is that it?”

  A reply, firm and cold, returned from somewhere close at hand in the smoke-haze. “Aye.”

  Tobeld tried to turn on his heel, but he was already leaving the ground, taken off his feet by a shadow that dwarfed him, a towering man-form in steel-grey armour holding a fistful of his robes. Leering out of the gloom came a hard face that was all angles and barely restrained menace. A patchwork of scarification was the setting for eyes that were wide with black mirth, eyes that bored into him. “Where are you going, little man?” He marvelled at the thought that someone so large had been able to approach him in utter silence.

  “Lord, I…” It was hard to talk. Tobeld’s throat was as dry as the winds, and the grip the Astartes had on him pulled the material of the robes tight about his neck. He struggled for breath—but he did not struggle too much, for fear the turncoat might think he was making some futile attempt to defend himself and respond in kind.

  “Hush, hush,” said the other voice. A second figure, if anything larger and more lethal in aspect than the first, stepped from the smoke. Tobeld’s eyes instantly fell to the intricate etching and jewelled medallions adorning the other Astartes’ chest, symbols of high rank and seals of loyalty among the Sons of Horus Legion. He knew this warrior immediately, the laughing face and the shock-blond hair, without need to survey the rank sigils upon him, though. Luc Sedirae, Captain of the 13th Company.

  “Let’s not make a song and dance of this,” Sedirae went on. His right hand flexed absently; he wore no gauntlet upon it, showing to the world where the limb had been lost and replaced by an augmetic in polished brass and anodised black steel. The hand had been taken from him in battle with the Raven Guard at Isstvan, so it was said, and the captain wore the wound proudly, as if it were a badge of honour.

  Tobeld’s gaze flicked back to the warrior holding him, finding the symbols of the 13th Company on the other Astartes. Belatedly, he recognised him as Devram Korda, one of Sedirae’s seconds; not that such knowledge would do him any good. He tried again to speak. “Lords, I am only doing my duty as—”

  But the words seemed to curdle in
his throat and Tobeld choked on them, emitting a wet gasp instead.

  From behind Korda, following the path that Tobeld had taken around the parked craft, a third Astartes emerged from beneath the shadows cast by the drop-ship. The assassin knew this one, too. Armour the colour of old, dried blood, an aspect like a storm captured in the confines of a man’s face, eyes he could not bring himself to meet. Erebus.

  “His duty,” said the First Chaplain of the Word Bearers, musing on the thought. “That is not a lie.” Erebus’ voice was soft and almost gentle, raised only slightly above the low keen of the Gyges winds.

  Tobeld blinked and felt a tide of terror growing to fill him. He rose on it, caught by the icy certainty of the moment. Erebus knew what he was. Somehow, Erebus had always known. All his careful subterfuges, every piece of flawless tradecraft he had employed—the Word Bearer walked towards him now with a swagger that told the assassin it had counted for nothing.

  “My duty is to serve the Warmaster!” he blurted, desperate to stall for time, for a moment more of life.

  “Quietly,” warned Erebus, silencing him before he could say more. The Word Bearer threw a glance towards the command tent. “Nothing will be gained by disturbing Great Horus. He will be… displeased.”

  Korda turned Tobeld in his grip, like a fisherman evaluating a disappointing catch before tossing it back into the ocean. “So weak,” he offered. “He’s dying even as I watch. The boneseekers in the air are eating him inside.”

  Sedirae folded his arms. “Well?” he demanded of Erebus. “Is this some game of yours, Word Bearer, or is there real cause for us to torment this helot?” His lips thinned. “I grow bored.”