Assassinorum kingmaker, p.2
Assassinorum Kingmaker, page 2
Curved and crimson, like a slashed throat.
She leaned forward over the handlebars to counterbalance the bucking hydraulics as her cycle clawed up the dirt road, cresting the last rise before her target.
Road. What a jest. It was nothing better than a shepherd’s track, a weaving line of pounded earth that climbed into the fog-bound moorland hills, used by none except the sure-footed curlhorns that picked their way up the foothills.
Once they’d been livestock, overseen for generations by the region’s herd-serfs. Then the reorganisation came and the displacement shortly thereafter. House footmen had moved in with lasguns to escort the herdsmen to their new home, two duchies over.
She’d been just a girl, then, but she remembered. Remembered how the footman who’d come into her home had looked apologetic as he did it. Uncomfortable. Said he was a servant, just like them. Empathised, even as he forced them from their home at gunpoint. Nothing lived here but the proud curlhorns now. It’s why Starne had picked it.
She stopped at the crest of the hill, raised her visor and spared a glance behind, picking out the weaving line of lanterns emerging from the trees at the bottom of the hill. Canine barks echoed up from the valley floor.
Then she slapped the visor down and gunned her dirtcycle’s engine, took the plunge down the other side of the slope – curlhorn track forgotten, feeling her machine buck beneath her as she jarred and wheeled over the humps, briefly catching air halfway down as she leapt a rise.
She’d done this once every season for the last seven years. Stealing out of her quarters at Gathering Palace with forged errand-orders that bought her a full day. Making it to the shed where she’d stashed the bike, heading into the hills. Always on the new moon. Transmitting her check-in codes and short reports. Dominion Station / Status Rep. Alpha, Rift+742dys / NTR.
NTR – Nothing to Report.
Tonight’s message would be significantly longer. She could feel the codebook heavy in the pocket of her leather jerkin.
A las-bolt streaked above her, stabbing blind in the deep shadows of the valley, briefly splashing her with an arc of passing colour as it sizzled overhead. Lighting the fog that gathered like poison gas in the bowl of the valley floor.
Starne jagged the handlebars, slewing the bike right, spewing gravel, to change her position and angle.
Two more spears of red lashed behind her, close to her old position, searing away the night vision in her left eye and leaving purple streaks she blinked away as she hit the valley floor, fully enveloped in the fog. Doused her light.
She could see the crumbling village emerging from the fog ahead. Thick rock walls and moss-colonised roofs. What doors and window shutters remained hung by single hinges, precarious.
Though she could no longer see the lanterns, she knew they were close. Shouts carried down from the hill behind.
Revise the timeline. Ten minutes to live. Make them good minutes.
It was right, somehow, that it would end here.
Starne left the bike at a fence in front of the first dwelling, hoping it might misdirect her pursuers. Give her another sixty seconds as they searched the wrong house. She snapped down the kickstand to activate the trigger and gingerly leaned it upright, then slipped into the tangle of houses.
Perhaps her sense of poetic justice had betrayed her. Her home village, after all, was a matter of house records. Any Gatekeeper or Kingsward would ken the pattern immediately. Displaced herder girl, promoted through house magnanimity to an important communications role, privately nurses her grief and resentment until it curdles and she turns traitor to her oaths.
A simple story, easy to understand – and true enough.
The Imperial spymaster had come to her during the Tallaxian Campaign, when the house Knights were crushing a subterranean tyranid infestation, and asked her if she wanted to do a service for the Emperor.
With compensation, of course.
Dominion had no currency, or at least none serfs could use. But life-saving pharms – blister packs that could be easily hidden in belongings and protect both her and what remained of her family from the plagues that regularly swept through the labouring classes – those were welcome.
Starne weaved through the buildings, found the tumbledown shack with the tree sprouting from one corner, roots worming through the foundation and big trunk forcing its way through the roof like a chimney.
A perfect frame for the long wire aerial that she’d coiled around it.
Starne could hear dogs barking in the fog-shrouded streets. Stablights glowing on the weed-choked common. Shouts of discovery.
Despite the tension, she smiled.
A whump of detonation on the far side of the village. Orange-lit fog boiling into the sky, rolling away in a visible shockwave.
They’d found the dirtcycle, moved it enough to trigger the plastek charge she’d planted behind the promethium tank.
The stablights in the common swung towards the explosion, bounced as the footmen began to run.
She reached the door to the hovel and gingerly stepped over the tripwire stretched taut across the threshold, its trigger keyed to the frag mine that sat above the door, pointing down from behind a false stone. She slipped in, closed the door and barred it.
In the night of mist, darkness and red lights, the blinking green and amber of the vox-caster comforted her.
She put her dirtcycle helmet on the table, pulled the autopistol from the back of her waistband and checked it. Set it down by the transmission unit so it would be within easy reach.
She dropped her codebook next to it and opened it to the message she’d just finished composing when that meddling arsehole Calthius – head serf-master of Gathering Palace, messenger wing – had walked into her chamber.
He’d taken an interest in her the month before. Made advances. Invited her to private training. She had said no, but Calthius was obsessed. He kept trying.
Starne didn’t know what Calthius intended when he’d slipped his master key in her room’s lock and walked inside. Perhaps he’d wanted to search it, find something that would give him leverage over her. Or to get her alone.
He’d definitely not expected to find her leaning over her personal trunk – the secret compartment in the lid dropped open to display a row of gold coins, message wafers, a codebook and a well-oiled autopistol all nestled in purpose-fit foam.
Starne killed the leering bastard, of course. But he was a big man and didn’t go quiet. The footmen came. Swordsmen, naturally. Nothing the autopistol couldn’t handle.
And now she had only minutes.
Dominion Station / Status Rep. Alpha, Rift +1088 dys
She typed with the trained speed of a lifelong messenger-serf. Accurate and decisive. Tuning out the growing volume of barking and iron-shod boots on turf. Of rotted windows and doors getting beaten down.
Just like when she was a girl.
A thump on the door, someone trying to force it.
Bad idea.
Ch-chink. BLAM.
The frag mine above the door frame. Starne could hear the little ball bearings shredding the footman’s flesh, cracking bones and rattling off the entrance flagstone to pepper the men behind.
She hit TRANSMIT.
She closed the codebook and strained, bending it in half, cracking the incendiary flare hidden in the spine. She dropped the smouldering hardback into the mould-eaten stone fireplace as the fizzling chemical flames started to lick up from its pages.
Las-bolts tore through the door behind her, stinging her left bicep, leaving an orange glow on the uneven piled-slate walls. Nearly hit the vox.
Starne grabbed up her autopistol and jammed it directly into the smoking hole in the door, squeezed off two bursts to keep them off her. Looked back at the vox.
SENDING… SENDING…
More las-fire lanced through the window to her left, blowing a brick out of one corner of the chimney, throwing it into the wall. The shutter broke inward and hung at a crazy angle.
SENDING… SENDING…
Starne slid to the window and opened up in the footman’s face point-blank. Bullets threw sparks from his stamped-metal helm as they drilled into his cranium and scoured her knuckles with slivers of metal shrapnel. He dropped.
She looked back.
SENDING… SENDI–
TRANSMISSION COMPLETE
Starne leapt across the room. Made the corner with its tangle of invading roots. More blind las-fire stormed into the windows, chipping the stones and boring black burn-holes in the vox-set.
She grabbed the roots and pulled herself upward, alarmed at how weak her left arm felt. She realised halfway up that the stinging las-shot had gone clean through her bicep. Above her, she could see the gap where the tree had forced its way through the roof, stars shining above.
The door gave in, boots behind her. Shouting.
She grabbed up through the hole, found the handle she’d embedded in the moss-slick roof just in case. Pulled herself through just as the first las-bolts drummed into the tree.
Rolled. Dropped, broke her fall poorly enough to bruise, but well enough not to cause injury. Roofs in her village, poor as it had been, were only about seven feet high.
Starne flipped the switch in the back of the hut, pulled her aching body up and ran.
The tube-charges under the vox went in a line like flame-crackers. One-two-three. Tore up the vox to destroy any trace of the final transmission. Lifted the roof right off the house.
Starne threw herself into the dry streambed just as the rain of stones arrived, thumping into the soft turf. Her exfiltration plan was, at least, going well. The fog was working to her advantage.
She ran crouched through the streambed, hearing the shouts and wails of wounded men in the mist. She passed under the stone bridge that was her waypoint, turned two points north-west and ran across the moor, her torn jerkin flapping.
The field was excellent concealment tonight. The fog made land navigation difficult for anyone who didn’t know the terrain. Starne hit the split-rail fence pen and slithered under, keeping the ghostly shade of a rock wall to her right.
She’d hidden a second bike in the forest up ahead, wrapped in a waterproof tarpaulin and wheeled into a thick bush. Escape would’ve been impossible but for the fog. Yet she might make it. Even still be alive when the Imperial intervention arrived.
Then she stopped.
Before her was a hillock she did not recognise.
But was that possible? These were her fields, where she’d played and worked as a child. She knew every row and pen – had the fog-disorientation and blood loss confused her? Was this a rotting haystack she’d never noticed, or an outshed that had passed into the shadows of her own memory?
She took a step forward, peering, then another. Reached through the thick fog to touch the hill.
Felt cold metal.
The hill began to move. Rise. Big servos whining. Pistons hissing. Three eyes the size of Starne’s hand lit the fog with an electric green glow.
The Knight Armiger rose above her, straightening from its hunched position. Fog condensate rolled off as the armour plates warmed from the nuclear furnaces within.
Starne could only stand, transfixed, as the terrible machine straightened and took a step, planting its feet in a wide stance to block her path. Allowing her to take in its massive stature as it shook the fog off.
Nearly three times her height. The span of its autocannon arms wide as a Valkyrie.
It had been waiting for her. A huntsman allowing its dogs to flush the prey into the open.
Starne yelled defiance. Pointed her autopistol upward and fired into the glowing eyes. Bullets flattened against the crystal of the ocular systems.
The Armiger hunched over her, her small form dwarfed by its bulk, unhurriedly pointing both autocannon barrels at the girl from the ruined village.
And the world ended in noise.
TWO
As autocannon rounds tore Tessenna Starne apart, her message was already in the wind.
She had known little about the technical specifications of the vox-set she’d been given. She had not needed to know. Indeed, even the nameless spymasters who had given her the instructions did not fully understand its workings.
Which was fitting. Because while the purpose of the organisation was to gather information, its operatives understood that natural curiosity was to be directed outward, at the enemy. One did not ask questions. Knowledge about sources and methods was something superiors granted if they deemed it necessary, not a thing one should seek out.
But despite its unremarkable drab green casing, the vox-set Starne operated for seven years was no ordinary unit.
Known as a subliminal astropathic-caster, or sub-caster, the unit had beamed its encoded message over the heads of the milling footmen – still trying to break down the door, at that point – past the shadows lumbering in the fog, over the forest, and to the chivalric fortress-halls of Gathering Palace.
There, it flashed over Heaven Defence West, one of the two fire-control stations that coordinated the planet’s air defences in case of enemy attack.
It beamed over the tournament ground – empty this time of year, its banner poles struck and stowed, the opposing box seats painted in the heraldry of House Stryder and House Rau empty. Come tilting season, the empty fields would fill with the Knights of the rival houses, their engines pulsing and weapons loaded. And clad in ancient and irreplaceable armour, they would tear at each other with great chainblades and massive cannons, egged on by the wild cheers of their kinsmen. These martial exploits would then be broadcast back to their home manors via its giant aerial vox-tower.
That tower was the message’s destination, and it used the reliable point to renew signal strength and change direction, redirecting its beam to the Chancel Fortress of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica that sat on the mountains overlooking Gathering Palace.
There, it met a young astropath named Drusus Mak. Or rather, it met a small coin-sized implant in his forebrain, inserted shortly after his successful soul-binding. Mak was unaware of the implant’s nature or function. He knew only that, on occasion, an encrypted message would float up from his subconscious and repeat, like an obnoxious hymn lyric, until he channelled it into the message harmony of the larger astropathic choir and sent it on its way through the warp.
Mak had no idea that this act, done without thought twice a year, was the entire reason why he’d been assigned to the backwater Knight world of Dominion.
Within the warp, the message piggybacked upon other astropathic traffic, the theory being that the best way to hide deeply secret data was amidst a stream of similar data. Yet when the stream hit the first relay station of Shautin, another implanted astropath separated the message from the stream of traffic, re-encrypted it, sanctified it, and sent it through the warp to astro station Pacificus Deep. There the process repeated before the final delivery into the sanctified atmosphere of Holy Terra.
At last, deep underneath the Obsidian Keep of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, it reached its final destination.
A reception choir of three astropaths received the communique, picking apart its layers of psychic encryption until only the original coded message remained. Never allowed to leave the keep, and living in dwellings that adjoined the reception room, they spent their lives off-shift in study and chant, and on-shift parsing messages that they could not read. Which was in fact a mercy, given that if by some impossible chance they did divine the contents of the message, they would be immediately executed.
It was a silent world of scratching quills and murmuring, as the astropaths sketched each communique via automatic writing, sealed it in a secure tube, and inserted it into the chest of a delivery servitor. At any one time, a dozen servitors idled in ranks, some with armour painted red for the Mechanicus fortress, green for the Militarum, blue for the Navy or purple for the Navis Nobilite.
The Dominion communique, on the other hand, received unusual care.
The chief of the astropath triarchy loaded it, with caution, into the chest-port of a matt-black, up-armoured servitor. She took such care because she knew that the cylinder port sat between two melta charges designed to trigger if they detected tampering.
Then the astropath spoke the code word that sent the tracked, vat-born monstrosity trundling down the tunnel marked with a skull and cross, its cranium bisected with a dagger.
To the Officio Assassinorum.
Despite the Officio Assassinorum’s dark reputation, it is well named. Much of it is indeed an office, and were some Administratum official to find themselves in one of its control centres, they would not think themselves out of place until they made the fatal mistake of looking carefully at the paperwork being processed.
Because for every operative firing a killing shot or wielding an alien phase blade, there are a thousand clerks, analysts and logisters determining where the operatives should go, who they should kill, and how their equipment will arrive.
Managing the vast amount of incoming signals traffic falls under the purview of the Office of Missions, and that was where the Dominion Communique first landed on the desk of Eadwinne Foe.
An overworked man in his middle fifties, balding and with a clerk’s perpetual stoop, he was no one’s idea of an assassin. Indeed, his wife and friends thought he had a rather dull job in the Administratum, processing and approving requests for agri-chemical shipments.
Yet it was his job to intake each communique from field agents, send them through decryption, then route the decrypted messages through the analysts for vetting and verification.
Normally, should the message be considered genuine and of sufficient importance, Foe would elevate it to the next level of bureaucracy where the process would repeat, but with those of a higher security clearance. Should it fall short, he might route it, anonymously, to the Militarum or Office of Planetary Governance.
