Just Desserts

Being a simple tale of revenge. A darkly humorous series of vignettes as a self-trained assassin goes about wreaking his revenge on just about everybody. Oddly enough, this was the first proper short story I wrote in the 40k universe. 5,000 words Writing time :1 day Finished :21st November 2005 Download as Word file

Callow Zurrat, a short, rake-thin man of indeterminate age and utterly nondescript appearance, sighed heavily as he rested the weighty piles of plaswax printouts on the cluttered table-top. It had been another long day in the scriptorum transcribing merchants’ accounts for the Officio Assessoria, and his eyes were watery and painful, his hands cramped and blistered. If he saw or heard the Assessor approaching, he gave no indication.

“Get that damn stuff off my desk, you worthless ape!” grunted High Assessor Brant, who roughly shoved the pile as he passed, spilling the contents off his desk and onto the floor. The flow of glossy paper caught an ornate lamp on the High Assessors’ desk and knocked it onto the thickly carpeted floor as well.

“Now look what you’ve done!” said the High Assessor as he back-handed the cowering scribe out of the way, and bent to recover his lamp.

To his considerable surprise he kept bending over until his head bumped gently into the dense carpet, and then he keeled over to one side. His eyes widened as the furious oaths he was summoning failed to appear on his lips.

Zurrat moved gracefully and swiftly to seal the doorway to the High Assessor’s office chamber, punching in a long crypt-code from memory. He did not want to be disturbed. After recovering the glass-tipped dart from the folds of fat in the High Assessor’s neck, he heaved the man into a sitting position. He was stronger than he looked to the casual observer, but even so he grunted with the effort of moving the obese man’s bulk.

He produced a snub-nosed laspistol, matt black and silenced, from one inner pocket and a second glass-tipped dart from another. He stabbed the dart into the Assessor’s neck and waited for the counter-paralytic to take effect. The unwavering muzzle of the laspistol occupied the Assessor’s complete attention as the cold floating sensation of the first drug receded from his nerves and muscles.

“My name is Callow Zurrat, and you are High Assessor Wilhelm Brant. Nod once.”

Brant nodded once. His mouth felt dry, although he could not tell if that was a side-effect of the drugs now in his system.

“Three years ago you sent a report to your superiors at the Administratum regarding the tax affairs of a small town in the Upporia Province. The town was called East Gathering. You do not remember this town, am I correct?”

Brant tried to speak, failed to do more than grunt, and nodded again instead.

“Your report resulted in the launch of a Marauder strike against East Gathering and, I believe, some forty other towns and cities in Upporia Province who were – remiss – with their Imperial revenues. You knew that aerial strikes against some or all targets would be the inevitable result of the report you submitted, to ensure the future smooth flow of revenue from this planet.”

Brant stared, and then quickly nodded as he realised the man had stopped talking.

“Tell me which town I was born in.”

Brant stared, terrified and confused, and realised he would have to say something. His tongue was thick and lifeless in his mouth, but he managed to say “Ees Ath’ring?”

“East Gathering. Well done. Where my family lived. Goodbye High Assessor Brant.” He pulled the hair-trigger twice, waited, and then pulled it twice more.

After checking the corpulent man slumped on the carpet was dead, he pulled out a stiletto blade from his belt and, a few moments later, used Brant’s retinal patterns to access the data cogitator on the ex-Assessor’s desk, getting blood all over the ocular scanner in the process. All traces of scribe Zurrat in the system were removed.

Before leaving the office, Zurrat placed and set the timer on an evidence bomb, that would scorch the air and all trace materials in the room without setting off the fire sensors, and then Callow Zurrat calmly and quickly left the Officio spire for the last time.

#

Wing Commander Oblensk of the Imperial Navy Frantric 13th Marauder Squadron stepped up to the facial recognition scanner and waited for the criss-crossing beams to glide across his cragged features. When they did not do so, he frowned, and rapped sharply on the glass with his gloved knuckles. His hand froze in place as he felt something cold and very, very sharp slip quickly around his neck.

“Wing Commander Rakeer Oblensk, this is a nano-toothed adamantium filament and I have wrapped it tight round your neck. If you move the teeth will start to vibrate just slightly below the speed of sound while the filament contracts rapidly. Tap your hand once on the glass to show you understand me.”

After a pause, Oblensk tapped one finger on the glass of the scanner. He could feel beads of sweat starting to form on his face.

“My name is Callow Zurrat. You do not know me. You have never seen me. Four years and two months ago you carried out seven aerial bombardments on towns and cities of Upporia Province. Tap once to confirm this.”

The officer’s hand did not move.

“I ask you to acknowledge my words as a courtesy Wing Commander, so you can play a part in this process. I already know the truth of what I say. I repeat - four years and two months ago you carried out seven orbital bombardments on towns and cities of Upporia Province. Tap once to confirm this.”

With a howl of rage Oblensk spun on his heel, his upraised arm flexing to deliver an elbow strike to the assassin standing behind him, but to his surprise there was no-one there, and to his even greater surprise when his body stopped its spin his head just seemed to keep on going and spun right round to look back at the scanner that was now, technically, behind him.

His head toppled as his body dropped to the floor and rolled to rest looking up at the ceiling of the room, where a black-clad figure rested lightly in an impossibly confined space.

“I never said I was still holding the filament, Wing Commander,” the figure said as vision and consciousness faded to nothing.

#

After worming his way out of the Naval training facility’s ventilation systems Callow Zurrat removed his shadow-skin clothing, obtained at great expense from xeno-artifact traders, and sat down against a boarded-up doorway in a low-rent hab area to review his progress so far. His data-slate contained a total of 182 names and addresses, as well as miscellaneous bibliographical information on most of the individuals, arranged neatly in alphabetical order. He scored out Wing Commander Oblensk’s name with the stylus, opened the file for Marla Ozzirak, and began to read.

#

Techpriest Reynard moved amongst the holy machines, affixing a sacred seal here, smearing some holy unguent there, taking the kind of care of his charges a mother would take of her new-born babies. He paused, puzzled at a pool of dark fluid that had collected beneath the triptonase decelerator. A flexible mechadendrite snaked its way out from under his metallic robes and plugged into the orifice of the machine’s dataport as he began to create a new entry on his data-slate.

A surge of agonising anbaric energy poured from the machine orifice along his unprotected, augmetic limb and bathed him in blue fire, his robes sparked and smoking from the arcing discharges. A high-pitched, inhuman scream came from the grille covering the lower half of his face before this too erupted into fire and smoke. His organic eye burst before his implanted one did.

He fell, still writhing to the ground, and his mechadendrite was jerked out of the socket by the force of his fall.

In the total blackness and data-emptiness of his agony he heard a soft padding of cloth-covered feet, as his eight remaining senses faded and failed.

“Techpriest Alfonso Reynard. My name is Callow Zurrat. Five years ago you supervised the production facility at the naval munitions factory on Impethia Prime. The shells that destroyed my town were made under your supervision and you -”

The techriest was dead. Zurrat checked to make sure, and then padded softly away down the rows of humming machines.

#

Zurrat’s training had been long, hard and very, very expensive. Although not anything like as intensive or advanced as the fabled Imperial Assassins of legend – hallowed names like Callidus, Eversor and Vindicare that struck fear into the hearts of greedy Governors and wayward Warmasters alike – it had been comprehensive and detailed enough to begin him on his personal path of vengeance, a path that was now, after almost seven years, reaching an end.

The needle-thin wires supported his weight, and more, over the vertiginous drop at the side of the hab tower, a low cloud layer piling up against the side of the tower almost five hundred metres below him. Clad once again in his reliable shadow-skin he inched his way lower and lower, the driving hail and rain a minor inconvenience that he compensated for without thinking, icy water streaming over the hydrophobic suit to drop in thin rivulets to the cloud layer far below, and the ground below that. Reaching the window of his final target he carefully removed a mono-wire blade from his glove-pouch, activated the phasing ability of the four-inch molecular blade and slid it effortlessly into the thick plasglass window.

A deft flick of the wrist and a fist-sized disc of plasglass fell out soundlessly and dropped away, disappearing almost at once. Not that Zurrat watched it fall. He already had his hand through the hole and keyed the latch release mechanism. In one athletic and death-defying move he cut the support wire attached to his harness with the mono-blade and adhered the gecko-pads on his knees and elbows to the broad expanse of plasglass. It pivoted immediately under his carefully-balanced weight, tilting backwards and sliding him feet first into the dark hab.

He rolled as he landed, silently, and crouched warily behind a dilapidated chest of drawers. The window tilted closed behind him and the sounds of the storm outside faded away instantly. Listening for any signs of activity in the hab he mind-flicked his variable retinas to infra-red and began to move stealthily but swiftly through the still-sleeping dwelling.

He found his target passed out on a chair in her bedroom, a bottle of something cheap-smelling dropped at her bare feet. He dropped a small capsule in her lap and took the only other seat in the room, his movements sure and fluid as ever. The capsule began to puff and smoke, and after a few moments the woman began to roll her head from side to side, cough, splutter and then, with startled but bloodshot eyes, come fully awake.

“Aslene Zyphyr. My name is - well, after tonight I will change my name, and leave this part of my life forever. I think we can safely say that at least part of that applies to you too. You can’t move, of course you know that already, but I will draw your attention to my gun, pointing at your head, in case you somehow summon the energy to scream. I can assure you I am a quicker killer than you are a screamer. Don’t put that to the test, I beg you.”

The drugged woman realised her vocal chords were not paralysed. “Who, who are you? What are you going to do with me? I, I have no money, you can see I –“

“Silence Ms. Zyphyr. Please, be quiet. What a fortunate name you have Ms. Zyphyr, although I doubt you appreciate that at this juncture. You have enjoyed five years of life your guilty comrades-in-slaughter have not had. You should be thanking me.”

The woman opened her mouth to protest, but he silenced her with a wave of his gloved hand.

“Seven years ago, almost to the day – would you believe it? Has it been so long? – my home town was cratered from on high, my family killed. It was one of many, many towns and cities that had chosen not to pay the full Imperial revenue that year, on the grounds that a cogitator error had misplaced a decimal point and was threatening to bankrupt the province. Retaliation was, of course, ordered against some of those who chose to challenge the Imperial order. You were one of a group of cogitator programmers who wrote the sub-routines that randomly determined which towns were targeted and which were not. The other members of your team – and I suspect you know this from the state I find you in – died some time ago, one by one, at my hand. The policia rarely bother themselves with people like you, is that right? Just another tech-scribe with delusions of paranoia. Well, you will be pleased to know you were right. I am out to get you.”

"But, but I had nothing to do with it, your town, I'm just a cogitator programmer, I wrote those routines for crop-spraying cycles – I had no idea they would get used –“

"Enough. I know who and what you are." Zurrat sighed. "When I started I was looking for the man, the one man who had given the order to destroy my town. The man who had pushed the button. The man who was responsible. And I was going to kill him. Funny thing, though. Turns out there is no such man. Or -" he waved the gun, "-woman. No-one in the whole Imperium actually decided to annihilate this town on that day. There were lists and projections and assessments and orders, but not one single person responsible. So. I decided to kill everybody. Everybody who was even remotely connected with the attack, and that, my dear Ms. Zyphyr, includes you."Zurrat stood up suddenly and raised his pistol. “Aslene Zyphyr, good –“

The words stuck in his throat. He pumped his jaw, eyes bulging with the effort, but no sound came out.

“I’ll take that,” said a hooded figure from behind him. A hand covered in delicate and subtle tattoos reached past Zurrat’s shoulder and took the snub-nosed las from his immobilised, outstretched hand.

Aslene Zyphyr screamed once, and then fainted.

The hooded figure moved to his side, silent as a whisper on satin, and with a gentle shove on his chest, pushed him back down into the chair he had just arisen from.

Zurrat’s mind was working furiously, auto-glands pumping detox and stims into his bloodstream, but nothing seemed to counteract the effect of whatever drug was rapidly encircling his honed muscles with bonds of steel.

The hooded figure stood over by the woman’s bed. Behind him – or her – Zurrat still couldn’t tell, the rain and hail continued to hurl itself against the filthy window high on the hab-spire.

“I am here to teach you the consequences of your actions, former linen merchant Callow Zurrat. It seems you fancy yourself as something of the assassin.” The hooded figure laughed, and Zurrat realised she was female. His throat was now frozen solid, his muscles useless.

“I watched your pathetic and clumsy attempts to secure entry to this hab, looking for this wretch it would appear. You were no harder to track than a grox in an office. A sorry excuse for an assassin, with a sorry excuse for a target. You two suit each other.”

The hooded woman moved over to the open doorway and glanced outside before returning to stand before the window.

“Very well. I am a busy woman, but you are, at least, the end of this particular and very long job, so I might as well tell you why you are to die. My employer ran a very successful importing business in one of the larger cities on this filth-ball of a planet. One day the Arbites raided his office and carried off certain – goods, shall we say? – that the Imperials were not best pleased to see he had. It was a random raid, but a very – very – expensive one for my employer. Almost as expensive as hiring me to kill the man responsible.” The cowled assassin paused.

“Strange. Try as I might I couldn’t find anyone who had actually ordered the Arbites to raid that business on that day. There were lists, and work schedules, and weekly targets, and it seemed to just happen without anyone actually saying so. So I improvised, and decided to kill absolutely everyone involved – a considerable number of people as it turns out. And the last – alphabetically speaking - of those people is you, Zurrat. As I heard you say moments ago, it’s a lucky name you have there Mr Z.”

Zurrat shifted in his seat, and a low moan escaped his clenched teeth.

“Hmm? Questions? What did you do, perhaps? Simple, although definitely not central. You illegally accessed the data cogitator systems of the Officio Assessoria five years ago. This access was noticed and the systems reset to prevent further damage. If it hadn’t been for that reset another business would have been chosen by the cogitators to be placed on the short list of candidates for random raids that month, and my employer would not have suffered as he did. And you would not be about to die.”

She aimed a very sleek-looking flechette pistol at Zurrat, one that would strip the flesh from his bones in a fraction of a second. “Goodnight, Mr Zu-“

A searing arc of green light tore across the darkened room from the direction of the window, showering the three people in shards of plasglass and scorching the outstretched arm of the female assassin to the bone. The hooded woman screamed once, briefly, before stim drugs coursed through her system and began to seal the crisping flesh and ease the mind-numbing pain. She dropped to her knees, clutching the blackened bones of her left arm, staccato breaths of agony escaping her white lips.

“Madame Zeremere,” hissed the cloaked figure who crawled through the shattered window and onto the ceiling. “That’s a lucky name you have there.”

THE END

Comment Links

You are welcome to add your comment on this story here or:- at the Black Library fiction forum Note you will need an account to post at this site. You can view old comments at this archived thread at Relic Forums