Jaq ran along the so-called Lane of Loveliness of Caput City, boltgun in one hand and force rod in the other. This particular boltgun was plated with iridescent blue titanium inlaid with silver runes. The force rod was virtually unadorned, a solid black flute embedded with a few enigmatic circuits. The force rod was for use against whatever spawn of Chaos he encountered, to augment his psychic attack. The rowdy boltgun was for use right now – against a trio of cultists who darted from cover amongst giant broken potsherds which were the remains of one of the glazed ceramic buildings. The cultists’ eyes were glazed with frenzy. One fired a stub gun inaccurately. Bullets from the slugger pinged off a nearby wall of glazed terracotta. The second cultist was swinging a chainsword two-handed. Obviously he was unfamiliar with the weapon. The sword buzzed furiously as its razor-edged teeth spun round, cutting empty air. The third of the cultists was a burly muscular brute. From a hand flamer gushed a narrow cone of burning fuel. Heat scorched Jaq’s face, but none of the fiery droplets had touched him. Such a flamer was too compact a weapon to be worth firing from a distance, nor could its reservoir hold much pressurized fuel. Each blazing aerosol jet was spectacular but it extinguished quickly. You had to be close to your target.
Jaq’s bolter yakkered. Several bolts erupted in the body of the flamer wielder. It was as though the man had been booby-trapped internally with packets of explosive. These now detonated. For a moment the cultist quivered like jelly. The muscle-bound envelope of his body actually seemed to contain the shock waves. Abruptly he burst apart, gutted thoroughly and bloodily.
A bolt from Jaq’s gun caroomed off a great glazed potsherd, winging skyward into the haze of smoke which drifted across the city front fires. Subsequent bolts tore the gunman apart, then the swordsman too. Jaq sniffed the sharp nitric aftermath of propellant which had ignited after each bolt flew from the muzzle.
‘Noisy,’said Meh’lindi.
Yes, noisy. Yet with hardly any recoil. RAAARK, the gun would utter with each squeeze of the trigger. It hardly bucked at all in one’s hand. With a plosive pop it would ejaculate a bolt. With a flaring swish, that bolt would ignite and accelerate away. Then there would come the thud of impact, followed by the blast of detonation.
RAARK-pop-SWOOSH-thud-CRUMP: this was the lingo of a boltgun. When it uttered several such statements, what a cacophony! The name of this particular boltgun, inscribed on the trigger guard, was Emperor’s Mercy.
Meh’lindi held a laspistol in one hand and a toxic needle pistol in the other. Both weapons were delicately damascened. She had sprayed herself with black synthetic skin and wore her red assassin’s sash twisted around her loins, various secrets concealed therein. The sash and her golden eyes were the only
colours visible. Otherwise, she was a deadly black effigy of herself – supple and lithe. Even her eyelids were black as night. She had eschewed the digital weaponry which sometimes adorned her fingers like baroque thimbles.
Jaq wore lightweight mesh armour under his black habit, but Meh’lindi needed none. Her syn-skin would resist flame and flash and poison gas as well as honing her vitality. She breathed and spoke through a throat plug. She heard – acutely – through ear plugs.
She favoured the needle pistol. The bursts of energy from the laspistol tended to disperse over distance, especially if the air was hazy, as now. It appealed to her assassin’s instincts to speed tiny toxic dartlets by laser pulse into some distant target.
Abruptly Meh’lindi pivoted. Without seeming to take aim she fired at a rooftop, twice. Two cultists convulsed as neurotoxins ravaged their nervous systems.
For Jaq, with his psychic sense, a vast shape seemed to brood in the smoke over the city. The shadowfigure wore a carnivorous, bullish head. How balefully its eyes gloated at all the killing which was in progress. Two mighty arms ended in serrated crab claws. A single female breast bulged obscenely. The presence came and went, a phenomenon of the smoke.
Could many other people than Jaq perceive that manifestation? ‘Do you see it, Meh’lindi?’Jaq demanded, gesturing. ‘It’s up there again!’
She shook her head. Yet she believed him. She hissed assassin’s curses – as if those curses might injure an aerial apparition which gallingly did not even register upon her senses.
Somewhere in the city a corrupted Cult Magus must be invoking and conjuring and sacrificing victims while praying to the cards of a Chaos Tarot.
Jaq pointed his force rod at the sky.
‘Don’t listen to me,’ he ordered Meh’lindi. Yet how should an assassin fail to register every diagnostic sound in her vicinity? ‘At least try not to understand me. Try to hear just noise.’
She began to chant some primitive outlandish barbarisms from her erstwhile jungle-world home which she would never see again, nor wished to.
‘Avaunt, daemon,’ yelled Jaq. ‘Apage, O’tlahsi’isso’akshami! Begone, Slave of Lust! In nomine Imperatoris ego te exorcizo!’
He discharged his weapon, and his psychic rebuttal, skyward. A pastel-orange glow ballooned. The phantom was gone. For the moment.
This was not the first occasion on this violent day that Jaq had used his force rod. Earlier, though through no fault of his own, he had used it too late. And Vitali had died in the embrace of a dancing daemonette.
A daemonette present in Chaos-flesh – and in Chaos-chitin!
Plainly this world needed Jaq for its salvation. Yet he must only linger long enough to find a new Navigator and to abduct a first-class astropath.
A higher purpose claimed him. Or was his quest an obsessed and futile one?
Vitali had died in that sweet and lethal embrace… How much better if Meh’lindi had killed the Navigator immediately after they landed at the besieged space port.
