Assassinorum Kingmaker, page 9
‘It was a groxshit plan, and I said so. Telling us what we should do, instead of asking what we can do.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you backed me up on that.’ Sycorax leaned forward in a toast, and crystal tumbler met thermos in an ugly scrape. She waited until Koln took a drink before adding: ‘But you’re no better.’
Koln brought the tumbler down, swallowed. In her enhanced vision, Sycorax saw a faint movement behind her pupils. Amber rings, rotating.
‘Sorry?’ asked Koln.
‘Apology accepted.’
‘No, sorry, I was unclear–’
‘Apology accepted.’
‘I–’ Koln stopped. ‘You’re manipulating me. To prove a point.’
‘Yes. Because it’s what I do. As a Callidus. Social manipulation. It’s the specialty the temple designed me for with their indoctrinations, and scalpels, and training. The reason I was selected for this mission, other than this.’ She tapped the skull-port. ‘By all rights, it should’ve been me making the approach to Rakkan. You poached it, just like you initiated Raithe’s plan and snatched Rakkan before getting an order to.’
‘It increased–’
‘Efficiency, I know. But deep down, I also think you believe Templum Vanus should be running this operation. Maybe you’re even right. But working how you are is pissing me off, and Raithe too. You collect an entire structure of evidence supporting your own plan of action, and tell us at the last minute. That’s not collaboration, it’s a power grab. To be honest, I can’t blame you for it. Intrigue and data collection is your specialty.’
‘But you didn’t object.’ The rings in Koln’s eyes were rotating again, adjusting. A tell. Sycorax had unbalanced her. Good.
‘There were reasons to let you do the approach,’ admitted Sycorax. ‘I need a good rapport with Rakkan. And if it fell to threats, he might not have forgiven me. Besides, your technocratic undermining act is annoying, but if it’s effective enough to handle a Vindicare, you could handle a Knight pilot.’
‘And now,’ Koln laughed, ‘I’m the one being handled.’
‘Don’t take it personally. I’m just offering you a fair warning. You’re good at what you do, but just remember that I am too. It’s Raithe I’m worried about. This mission doesn’t match his standard modus operandi.’
‘You said he’s going to get us killed.’
‘Because he is.’
Koln took a drink, eyes staring into the bulkhead. Not a social affectation, Sycorax decided, but a focusing technique. Accessing the thoughts of her augmented conscious.
‘Have you considered that might be the point?’ Koln asked. ‘That we’re not meant to come back?’
‘Plenty of missions are one-way.’
‘No…’ Koln’s eyes darted back and forth, as if she were reading a document only she could see. ‘This is different. It’s specific. I’ve been reviewing our operational histories. After-action reports. There are commonalities.’
‘Like?’
‘Both Raithe and I are fresh off missions involving the conqueror_wyrm. Raithe killed a heretek researcher who was trying to further mutate Quivarian’s infection algorithm. I identified a penal world outbreak, and you…’
‘I?’
‘You killed Programmator Quivarian.’
Sycorax kept breathing. Didn’t blink. Just snorted like it was ridiculous.
‘Don’t deny it. I got a hold of your unredacted service record. Not many details there, but I was able to piece enough together. That research station you mentioned. It was Quivarian’s, where he developed heart_wrym into a broadcast virus. To get in, you got infected.’
‘No.’ Sycorax tossed the thermos back to Koln. The Vanus caught it without looking. ‘No, I wasn’t. When they uploaded heart_wyrm to my skull jack, it got funnelled into a segregated neural implant that the Mechanicus later removed and destroyed. Six months of screenings turned up no taint.’
‘But they still suspect you. Treat you like tainted goods. Reason enough to send you on a one-way mission.’
‘Raithe’s about to be Sicarius Primus. They wouldn’t throw him away.’
Koln raised her eyebrows, looked back at Sycorax. ‘Oh, Templum Pacificus would mourn him. But not the command structure. Every Sicarius Primus in history has moved into leadership if they survive, most to Operations. You think M of O wants to deal with a potential rival? If Raithe succeeds in killing Yavarius-Khau but dies, everyone gets what they want. M of O eliminates a threat. The Assassinorum rids itself of potentially infected operatives, and Vindicare Pacificus gets their Sicarius Primus hero, but only posthumously.’
Sycorax thought on that a moment. It was true that the bureaucracy of the Assassinorum was a deadly place. Most senior leadership roles only turned over when the office holder expired, and almost never of natural causes. Generally, one advanced by removing superiors.
And the suspicions about infection… that scanned. Quivarian’s wyrms could only infect those with neural bionics. Artificial or synthetic cranial augmentations that interacted directly with the thought-centres of the brain. So while organic humans were immune – it would not affect an augmetic eye or limb – the priests and thralls of Mars were uniquely vulnerable.
And every assassin had some degree of neural augmentation, from Koln’s cogitation-centres to Raithe’s neurally linked spy mask, to her own synthetic memory storage with its expanded recall of names, faces, conversations and relationships.
‘I remotely accessed the Templum Vanus archives,’ said Koln. ‘I have a copy, though it’s six months out of date – and pulled some data from the Vindicare ones as well. In ninety-seven per cent of cases, operatives deployed against the Transmuted subsequently received an assignment with a threat level rated “very high”. Eighty per cent did not return from those missions.’
Sycorax leaned back on her hands, looked up at the glow-globe in the ceiling, sitting in its wire cage. ‘You’re saying we’re being culled.’
‘Yes,’ Koln said. ‘And I don’t know about you, but I intend to survive.’
‘And how do we achieve that?’
‘First,’ Koln said, ‘we need the best, up-to-the-minute intelligence on Dominion. Meaning we need to keep Rakkan alive.’
‘Raithe is dead-set against that, and to be honest, I’m not convinced. It’s never preferable to have two of the same person dashing around. Both Callidus doctrine and common sense.’
‘Do you really think you can learn everything there is to know about being Rakkan within two weeks, even with his help?’
Sycorax thought. ‘No.’
‘So we need to keep him alive, and since Raithe has already entrenched in his own position, we can’t convince him by debate or argument. He needs to feel like he’s in charge.’ Koln held out the thermos again. ‘Some more?’
Sycorax took the klaava. ‘You want to trick him.’
‘No, I want him to trick himself.’
‘Difficult.’
‘Not really, it’s just about presenting the data in the correct way.’ Koln tapped a few commands into a wrist-cogitator. A small network of dots and lines hovered in the air. ‘What’s this?’
‘Don’t play scholam instructor,’ said Sycorax. ‘It’s the constellation Ursid Majoris, from the holy sky over Terra. I have seen the dome frescoes of a cathedral before, Avaaris.’
‘And it’s called Ursid Majoris because…?’
‘Because it looks like a bear.’
‘Does it?’ Koln tapped a key and the lines connecting the dots disappeared. She rotated the constellation, the dots turning as if on an axis. ‘What about now, do you see a bear?’
Sycorax leaned forward, said nothing. But she liked Koln’s expression of mischief, so she reciprocated with a tilted half-smile. ‘No.’
‘At some point, when you were very young, someone told you it was a bear – so you see a bear. Yet these random points of data only look like a bear when viewed from a specific perspective, and with the right prompting. Your conclusion comes not from the data, but how it’s presented.’
‘So what are you proposing?’
‘Simple. Raithe distrusts your instincts – so I want you to start agreeing with him.’
THIRTEEN
‘A squire serves a knight, a knight serves a lord, a lord serves a baron, and a baron serves a monarch. So, who does the monarch serve? He serves every subject, from the rudest serf to the members of the court. Chivalric fealty, when ideally practised, is not a pyramid but a circle.’
– Lucien Yavarius-Khau, High Monarch of Dominion, from his Meditations on the Code Chivalric
The drukhari wych came right at him, leaping a cargo crate and springing off the wall as it made for Raithe, splinter pistol extended in one hand. She was all lithe, deadly grace, her ritualistic gladiatorial armour cut out in sections on her right side. Flame hair done up in a topknot, a sickle blade raised above her head.
His Exitus pistol round hit her directly in her scar-crossed face.
An alert in his spy mask.
He dropped and spun, landing on one knee and firing through the abdomen of another wych, right as her segmented razorflail sliced above his head. She burst into stardust, the round over-penetrating and clipping another leather-bound aeldari behind her.
Alert.
Above him, on the catwalk they used to service the Knight Armiger. Three targets dashing left to right. Trying to flank him.
His mask marked them in red, ballistics equations measuring range and speed spooling above their heads.
Three trigger pulls. Three more depraved xenos snuffed out.
He dived to his right, taking cover behind a cargo crate as he reloaded the pistol. Ghostly splinter rounds flashed past above him.
Splinter hit on left leg, the mask informed him. Targets remaining: 4.
He cursed.
Well, he’d wanted difficult. It wasn’t satisfying otherwise.
The Cult of the Ragged Edge. Six years dead. He’d been tasked to kill their succubus after she’d attacked the hives of Castus IV one by one, spilling so much blood it coagulated in the streets and made them impassable.
Killing her had not been as difficult as escaping her bloodbride coven – the fastest enemy he’d ever faced. That was why he’d used the recorded mission data from his spy mask to construct an internal training simulation.
Raithe slapped another magazine home and charged the first round. Reached down and unsheathed the long utility blade in his right hand. Saw the incoming target tags around him in the peripheral vision of his mask.
Developed a plan.
Executed.
He ran crouching to the wall, wedged himself into the space between the tarp-draped cargo pallets and slid around the other side. Came at the drukhari trio from behind as he closed on where they thought he was.
His blade slid through the first, punching in the side of the throat and ripping outward. Before the throat-cut aeldari had even dissolved into pixelated nothingness the other two were already felled by his pistol, their blue-tinged forms exploding into cubes like shattered safety glass.
‘Not bad,’ said Sycorax. ‘For fighting ghosts.’
Raithe drew a deep breath, the meditative calm of his exercises bleeding away just as he’d reached the state of pure, unconscious action he’d been chasing.
He tapped his mask, disabling the simulation, and removed it.
Sycorax leaned against a wooden cargo crate, sheathed in a black synskin bodysuit, vambrace on her wrist and neural shredder mag-locked to her thigh. Her mask hung like a hood at the nape of her neck.
‘Knowing my tools has kept me alive for a long time,’ Raithe said. He manually ejected the last round from his pistol, caught it as it arced spinning through the air, and slipped it into a loop on his webbing. ‘We turned this cargo bay into a training arena, and yet I’m the only one who’s used it.’
‘I’ve been studying my schematics,’ she said, thrusting her chin out at the Knight Armiger standing at the end of the rear hatch, tied down with guy-wires like it might float away. ‘At the end of this voyage, I have to know how to drive that. Koln says she’s made progress with Rakkan, might be ready to bring him out and let us start lessons.’
‘Good news.’ Raithe walked to a sheet lying on top of a crate and began disassembling his Exitus pistol with sure, quick movements. As each component came away, he wiped it with an oil rag, pausing to scrub the barrel with a pipe brush. ‘You will need to learn everything you can in the next week. Then we’ll kill Rakkan, liquefy the body and present you to the sacristan as him. A good test run to see if she considers anything amiss.’
He said it without taking his eyes off the gun parts.
‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘Koln might say she can keep Rakkan safe on the ship once we hit orbit, but do we want to risk that? Not sure I trust her.’
‘I trust her,’ said Raithe. ‘It’s a risk but I’m sure it’s calculated.’
‘Still, don’t want him to be found. Though who knows, I might kill him before the week is up, just get it over with.’
Raithe had picked up his pistol barrel and began scouring its insides with a brush, cleaning away any powder fouling. The brush stopped halfway.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I’ve watched him with Koln.’ The Callidus was looking at his pistol parts, speaking with a casual disinterest. She reached down and plucked up his utility knife, testing its weight. Snorted in disapproval. ‘So unbalanced! And this serrated edge…’
‘Do not touch that.’ Raithe took it out of her hand, and in a flash, he saw how if he reversed the motion he could plunge it between her collarbone and ribcage. ‘It’s classified. Part of the sacred armament of Templum Vindicare.’
‘It’s a knife,’ she said. ‘Sharpened metal. Not exactly a secret weapon – we should spar sometime, you can see me use the phase blade.’ She raised the vambrace fixed around her right forearm. Even with the alien blade stowed, Raithe could sense a slight, almost eager vibration.
‘It’s not a weapon,’ he corrected, annoyed at the edge creeping into his voice. ‘It’s a tool. A utility knife. There are functions beyond killing. It can cut climbing rope. Dig handholds. The serrated edge can saw through foliage to build shooting hides. And yes, it cuts a throat just fine.’
‘Multipurpose. Does more than one thing.’
‘Yes,’ he said, slapping the Exitus together, before she could get a closer look.
‘Much like me.’
He looked at her, trying to find an expression of mirth in the tilted mouth. ‘Excuse me?’
‘You tried to herd me into the approach you wanted. For Rakkan.’ She stepped towards him, within an arm’s reach. ‘I gave you my expert opinion that it wouldn’t work, but you pushed. Then you took away the approach and gave to it Koln. There were any number of ways that I could’ve–’
‘Koln knows how the chain of command works,’ he said, stepping back. Giving himself enough space to fire the Exitus pistol if she came for him. ‘She gives me options and analysis, and I choose which to execute. There is a clear process.’
‘And in Templum Callidus,’ she said, stepping to the side, circling, ‘we improvise. Go by instinct. Seize opportunities. I know my optimal methods, and won’t be micromanaged. Because when we get to Dominion, and I become Rakkan, I can’t act like some automaton you can order around or we’ll get found out.’
Her flat grey eyes seemed to look right into him. Raithe’s father had been a planetary vice-governor on Balmoran. When the old man had died, the diocese confessor had placed silver coins on his closed eyelids. One of Raithe’s first memories. And it was those cold silver discs that he thought of when she looked at him.
‘Trust me,’ she said.
‘You’re carrying this whole operation,’ he sneered. ‘I chose you to perform the most crucial part. Isn’t that enough trust?’
‘Then act like you believe I can handle it.’ Her features began to melt and distort, muscles and bone sliding beneath the surface until Rakkan’s face emerged. ‘Because I can.’
Raithe took a breath, steadied himself. ‘Sycorax, you can transform into anyone, isn’t that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then for the duration of this mission,’ he said, enunciating each word, ‘please transform into a person who respects authority.’
‘No,’ she said, voice alien in Rakkan’s mouth.
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘Master assassin, I can become anyone you want me to be for the mission. I will live other people’s lives. I’ll lie in their beds and eat their food. I’ll make friends and nurture lovers, then turn around and kill them if it’s required. I’ll blaspheme against the Emperor and lick the wounds of alien masters – but when we talk, I’m me. No one else.’
She brought her hands up to her face, cupping it, and when they parted she was herself again. In his stomach, Raithe felt an unusual squirm of discomfort at how easily she flowed into and out of identities. He had so long trained for one role, that the possibility of playing all roles felt like staring into a bottomless abyss.
‘I could kill Rakkan tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and still be convincing.’
‘I absolutely forbid that,’ said Raithe. ‘We will keep him alive at least a week.’
Sycorax shrugged. ‘You said we were going to kill him, sooner or later. My gut tells me sooner would–’
‘I have not made a final determination on when to terminate Rakkan.’
‘Very well,’ said Sycorax, voice dripping in vinegar. ‘Commander.’
Raithe watched her walk away, hands already disassembling the Exitus to clean any areas he’d missed.
He didn’t see Sycorax smile at the security picter in the corner.
In her cabin, Koln couldn’t help but laugh.
