Warhammer - Eisenhorn 01 - Xenos (Abnett, Dan) Read online

  XENOS

  For John Parsons, bonemagos.

  BY ORDER OF HIS MOST HOLY MAJESTY THE GOD-EMPEROR OF TERRA

  SEQUESTERED INQUISITORIAL DOSSIERS AUTHORISED PERSONS ONLY

  CASE FILE ii2:67B:AA6:Xad

  Please enter your authority code gt;

  Validating...

  Thank you, Inquisitor. You may proceed.

  VERBAL TRANSCRIPT OF PICT-RECORDED DOCUMENT

  LOCATION: MAGINOR DATE: 239. M41

  RECOVERED FROM SERVITOR RECORDING MODULE

  TRANSCRIBED BY SAVANT ELEDIX, ORDO HERETICUS

  INQUISITORIAL DATA-LIBRARY FACULTY,

  FIBOS SECUNDUS, 240. M41

  [Pict-record white noise segues to] Darkness. Sounds of distant human pain. A flash of light [poss. las-fire?]. Sounds of running.

  Pict-source moves, tracking, vibrating. Some stone walls, in close focus. Another flash, brighter, closer. Squeal of pain [source unknown]. An extremely bright flash [loss of picture].

  [Image indistinct for 2 minutes 38 seconds; some background noise.]

  A man [subject (i)] in long robes, calls out as he strides past close to the pict-source [speech unrecoverable]. Surroundings, dark stone [poss. tunnel? tomb?]. (i)'s identity unknown [partial face view only]. Pict-source moves in close behind (i), observing as (i) draws a force hammer from a thigh loop under his robe. Close up on (i)'s hands as he grips haft. Inquisitorial signet ring in plain view, (i) turns [face obscured by shadow], (i) speaks.

  VOICE (i): Move in! Move in, in the name of all that's holy! Come on and [words obliterated by sound-flash] bastard monster to death!

  Further flashes of light, now clearly close las-impacts. Pict-source filters fail to block glare [white out].

  [Image white out for 0 minutes 14 seconds; resolution slowly returning.] Passing in through the high stone entrance of some considerable chamber. Grey stone, rough hewn. Pict-source pans. Bodies in doorway, and also slumped down interior steps. Massive injuries, mangled. Stones wet with blood.

  VOICE OFF |(i)?[: Where are you? Where are you? Show yourself!

  Pict-source moves in. Two human shapes move past it to left, blurred [image-stall reveals one [subject (ii)] to be male, approx 40 years, heavy-set, wearing Imperial Guard-issue body plate [no insignia or idents], significant facial scarring [old], wielding belt-fed heavy stubber; other

  [subject (iii)] is female, approx 25 years, svelte, skin dyed blue, tattoos and body-glove armour of a Morituri Death Cultist initiate, wielding force blade [approx 45cm length].

  Blurred shapes (ii) and (iii) move beyond pict-source. Pict-source pans round, establishing sidelong view of (ii) and (iii) engaged in rapid hand-to-hand warfare with adversaries on lower steps. Adversaries are heterogeneous mix: six humans with surgical/bionic implants, two mutants, three offensive servitors [see attached file record for stall-frame details], (ii) fires heavy stubber [sound track distorts].

  Two human adversaries pulped [backwash smoke haze renders image partially indistinct], (iii) severs head of mutant, vaults backwards [transcriptional assumption - pict-source too slow to follow] and impales human adversary. Pict-source moves down [image jerky].

  VOICE OFF: Maneesha! To the left! To the l-

  Pict-source makes partial capture as (iii) is hit repeatedly by energy fire, (iii) convulses, explodes. Pict-source hit by blood mist [image fogs]. [Image wiped clear.] (ii) is yelling, moving ahead out of view, firing heavy stubber. Sudden crossfire laser effect [las-flare blinds pict-source optics].

  [Various noise sources, indistinct voices, some screaming.]

  [Image returns.] (i) is just ahead of pict-source, charging into wide, flat chamber lit by green chemical lamps [face illuminated by light for 0.3 seconds]. Subject (i) positively identified as Inquisitor Hetris Lugenbrau.

  LUGENBRAU: Quixos! Quixos! I put it all to the sword and the cleansing flame! Now you, monster! Now you, bastard!

  VOICE [unidentified]: / am here, Lugenbrau. Kharnagar awaits.

  Lugenbrau (i) moves off-image. Pict-source pans. Image jerky. Body parts scattered on chamber floor [composite identifies subject (ii) as one of nine corpses]. Major detonation(s) nearby. Image shakes, pict-source falls sidelong.

  [Image blank for 1 minute 7 seconds. Significant background noise.]

  [Image returns.] Lugenbrau partly visible off frame left, engaged in combat. Afterglow-residue of force hammer blows remain burned on image for several seconds [image indistinct].

  Pict-source turns to focus on Lugenbrau. Lugenbrau engaged in hand-to-hand combat with unknown foe. Movements too fast for pict-source to capture.

  Blur. Human figures [identity unknown, poss. adversary troops] move in from right frame. Heads of human figures explode. Figures topple.

  [White out. Pict-source blanked. Duration unknown.]

  [Image returns, imperfect] Jerky shots of ground and wall. Refocus blurring. Pict-source reacquires Lugenbrau and adversary in combat [smoke fumes haze view]. Combat as before too rapid for pict-source to capture. Extensive background noise. Glowing line [believed to be blade weapon] impales Lugenbrau. Image shakes [some picture loss]. Lugenbrau immolates [image burns out].

  [Pause/pict-blank of unknown duration.]

  [Image returns.] Close up of face looking into pict-source. Identity unknown [subject (iv)[. (iv) is handsome, sculptural, smiling, eyes blank.

  VOICE (iv): Hello, little thing. I am Cherubael.

  Light flash.

  Scream [believed to originate from pict-source].

  [Image out. Recording ends.]

  ONE

  A cold coming.

  Death in the dormant vaults.

  Some puritanical reflections.

  Hunting the recidivist Murdin Eyclone, I came to Hubris in the Dormant of 240.M41, as the Imperial sidereal calendar has it.

  Dormant lasted eleven months of Hubris's twenty-nine month lunar year, and the only signs of life were the custodians with their lighted poles and heat-gowns, patrolling the precincts of the hibernation tombs.

  Within those sulking basalt and ceramite vaults, the grandees of Hubris slept, dreaming in crypts of aching ice, awaiting Thaw, the middle season between Dormant and Vital.

  Even the air was frigid. Frost encrusted the tombs, and a thick cake of ice covered the featureless land. Above, star patterns twinkled in the curious, permanent night. One of them was Hubris's sun, so far away now. Come Thaw, Hubris would spin into the warm embrace of its star again.

  Then it would become a blazing globe. Now it was just a fuzz of light.

  As my gun-cutter set down on the landing cross at Tomb Point, I had pulled on an internally heated bodyskin and swathes of sturdy, insulated foul weather gear, but still the perilous cold cut through me now. My eyes watered, and the tears froze on my lashes and cheeks. I remembered the details of the cultural brief my savant had prepared, and quickly lowered my frost visor, trembling as warm air began to circulate under the plastic mask.

  Custodians, alerted to my arrival by astropathic hails, stood waiting for me at the base of the landing cross. Their lighted poles dipped in

  obeisance in the frozen night and the air steamed with the heat that bled from their cloaks. I nodded to them, showing their leader my badge of office. An ice-car awaited; a rust-coloured arrowhead twenty metres long, mounted on ski-blade runners and spiked tracks.

  It carried me away from the landing cross and I left the winking signal lights and the serrated dagger-shape of my gun-cutter behind in the perpetual winter night.

  The spiked tracks kicked up blizzards of rime behind us. Ahead, despite the lamps, the landscape was black and impenetrable. I rode with Lores Vibben and
three custodians in a cabin lit only by the amber glow of the craft's control panel. Heating vents recessed in the leather seats breathed out warm, stale air.

  A custodian handed back a data-slate to Vibben. She looked at it cursorily and passed it on to me. I realised my frost visor was still down. I raised it and began to search my pockets for my eye glasses.

  With a smile, Vibben produced them from within her own swaddled, insulated garb. I nodded thanks, put them on my nose and began to read.

  I was just calling up the last plates of text when the ice-car halted.

  'Processional Two-Twelve,' announced one of the custodians.

  We dismounted, sliding our visors down into place.

  Jewels of frost-flakes fluttered in the blackness about us, sparkling as they crossed through the ice-car's lamp beams. I've heard of bitter cold. Emperor grace me I never feel it again. Biting, crippling, actually bitter to taste on the tongue. Every joint in my frame protested and creaked.

  My hands and my mind were numb.

  That was not good.

  Processional Two-Twelve was a hibernation tomb at the west end of the great Imperial Avenue. It housed twelve thousand, one hundred and forty-two members of the Hubris ruling elite.

  We approached the great monument, crunching up the black, frost-coated steps.

  I halted. Where are the tomb's custodians?'

  'Making their rounds,' I was told.

  I glanced at Vibben and shook my head. She slid her hand into her fur-edged robes.

  'Knowing we approach?' I urged, addressing the custodian again. 'Knowing we expect to meet them?'

  'I will check,' said the custodian, the one who had circulated the slate. He pushed on up the steps, the phosphor light on his pole bobbing.

  The other two seemed ill at ease.

  I beckoned to Vibben, so she would follow me up after the leader.

  We found him on a lower terrace, gazing at the strewn bodies of four custodians, their light poles fizzling out around them.

  'H-how?' he stammered.

  'Stay back/ Vibben told him and drew her weapon. Its tiny amber Armed rune glowed in the darkness.

  I took out my blade, igniting it. It hummed.

  The south entry of the tombs was open. Shafts of golden light shone out. All my fears were rapidly being confirmed.

  We entered, Vibben sweeping the place from side to side with her handgun. The hall was narrow and high, lit by chemical glow-globes. Intruding frost was beginning to mark the polished basalt walls.

  A few metres inside, another custodian lay dead in a stiffening mirror of blood. We stepped over him. To each side, hallways opened up, admitting us to the hibernation stacks. In every direction, rows and rows of ice-berths ranged down the smoothed basalt chambers.

  It was like walking into the Imperium's grandest morgue.

  Vibben swept soundlessly to the right and I went left.

  I admit I was excited by now, eager to close and conclude a business that had lasted six years. Eyclone had evaded me for six whole years! I studied his methods every day and dreamed of him every night.

  Now I could smell him.

  I raised my visor.

  Water was pattering from the roof. Thaw water. It was growing warmer in here. In their ice-berths, some of the dim figures were stirring.

  Too early! Far too early!

  Eyclone's first man came at me from the west as I crossed a trunk-junction corridor. I spun, the power sword in my hand, and cut through his neck before his ice-axe could land.

  The second came from the south, the third from the east. And then more. More.

  A blur.

  As I fought, I heard furious shooting from the vaults away to my right. Vibben was in trouble.

  I could hear her over the vox-link in our hoods: 'Eisenhorn! Eisenhorn!'

  I wheeled and cut. My opponents were all dressed in heat-gowns, and carried ice-tools that made proficient weapons. Their eyes were dark and unforthcoming. Though they were fast, there was something in them that suggested diey were doing this mindlessly, by order.

  The power sword, an antique and graceful weapon, blessed by the Provost of Inx himself, spun in my hand. With five abrupt moves I made corpses out of them and left their blood vapour drifting in the air.

  'Eisenhorn!'

  I turned and ran. I splashed heavily down a corridor sluiced with melt water. More shots from ahead. A sucking cry.

  I found Vibben face down across a freezer tube, frozen blood gluing her to the sub-zero plastic. Eight of Eyclone's servants lay sprawled around her. Her weapon lay just out of reach of her clawing hand, the spent cell ejected from the grip.

  I am forty-two standard years old, in my prime by Imperial standards, young by those of the Inquisition. All my life, I have had a reputation for being cold, unfeeling. Some have called me heartless, ruthless, even cruel.

  I am not. I am not beyond emotional response or compassion. But I possess - and my masters count this as perhaps my paramount virtue - a singular force of will. Throughout my career it has served me well to draw on this facility and steel myself, unflinching, at all that this wretched galaxy can throw at me. To feel pain or fear or grief is to allow myself a luxury I cannot afford.

  Lores Vibben had served with me for five and a half years. In that period she had saved my life twice. She saw herself as my aide and my bodyguard, yet in truth she was more a companion and a fellow warrior. When I recruited her from the clan-slums of Tornish, it was for her combat skills and brutal vigour. But I came to value her just as much for her sharp mind, soft wit and clear head.

  I stared down at her body for a moment. I believe I may have uttered her name.

  I extinguished my power sword and, sliding it into its scabbard, moved back into the shadows on the far side of the hibernation gallery. I could hear nothing except the increasingly persistent thaw-drip. Freeing my sidearm from its leather rig under my left armpit, I checked its load and opened a vox link. Eyclone was undoubtedly monitoring all traffic in and out of Processional Two-Twelve, so I used Glossia, an informal verbal cipher known only to myself and my immediate colleagues. Most inquisitors develop their own private languages for confidential communication, some more sophisticated than others. Glossia, the basics of which I had designed ten years before, was reasonably complex and had evolved, organically, with use.

  Thorn wishes aegis, rapturous beasts below.'

  'Aegis, arising, the colours of space/ Betancore responded immediately and correctly.

  'Rose thorn, abundant, by flame light crescent.'

  A pause. 'By flame light crescent? Confirm.'

  'Confirm/

  'Razor delphus pathway! Pattern ivory!'

  'Pattern denied. Pattern crucible/

  'Aegis, arising/

  The link broke. He was on his way. He had taken the news of Vibben's death as hard as I expected. I trusted that would not affect his performance. Midas Betancore was a hot-blooded, impetuous man, which was partly why I liked him. And used him.

  I moved out of the shadows again, my sidearm raised. A Scipio-pattern naval pistol, finished in dull chrome with inlaid ivory grips, it felt reassuringly heavy in my gloved hand. Ten rounds, every one a fat, blunt man-stopper, were spring-loaded into the slide inside the grip. I had four more armed slides just like it in my hip pocket.

  I forget where I acquired the Scipio. It had been mine for a few years. One night, three years before, Vibben had prised off the ceramite grip plates

  with their touch-worn, machined-stamped engravings of the Imperial Aquila and the Navy motto, and replaced them with ivory grips she had etched herself. A common practise on Tornish, she informed me, handing the weapon back the next day. The new grips were like crude scrimshaw, showing on each side a poorly executed human skull through which a thorny rose entwined, emerging through an eye socket, shedding cartoon droplets of blood. She'd inlaid carmine gems into the droplets to emphasise their nature. Below the skull, my name was scratched in a clumsy scroll.
r />   I had laughed. There had been times when I'd almost been too embarrassed to draw the gang-marked weapon in a fight.

  Now, now she was dead, I realise what an honour had been paid to me through that devoted work.

  I made a promise to myself: I would kill Eyclone with this gun.

  As A devoted member of his high majesty the God-Emperor's Inquisition, I find my philosophy bends towards that of the Amalathians. To the outside galaxy, members of our orders appear much alike: an inquisitor is an inquisitor, a being of fear and persecution. It surprises many that internally, we are riven with clashing ideologies.

  I know it surprised Vibben. I spent one long afternoon trying to explain the differences. I failed.

  To express it in simple terms, some inquisitors are puritans and some are radicals. Puritans believe in and enforce the traditional station of the Inquisition, working to purge our galactic community of any criminal or malevolent element: the triumvirate of evil - alien, mutant and daemon. Anything that clashes with the pure rale of mankind, the preachings of the Ministorium and the letter of Imperial Law is subject to a puritan inquisitor's attention. Hard-line, traditional, merciless... that is the puritan way.

  Radicals believe that any methods are allowable if they accomplish the Inquisitorial task. Some, as I understand it, actually embrace and use forbidden resources, such as the Warp itself, as weapons against the enemies of mankind.

  I have heard the arguments often enough. They appal me. Radical belief is heretical.

  I am a puritan by calling and an Amalathian by choice. The ferociously strict ways of the monodominant philosophy oft-times entices me, but there is precious little subtlety in their ways and thus it is not for me.

  Amalathians take our name from the conclave at Mount Amalath. Our endeavour is to maintain the status quo of the Imperium, and we work to identify and destroy any persons or agencies that might destabilise the power of the Imperium from without or within. We believe in strength through unity. Change is the greatest enemy. We believe the God-Emperor has a divine plan, and we work to sustain the Imperium in stability until that plan is made known. We deplore factions and in-fighting... Indeed, it is sometimes a painful irony that our beliefs mark us as a faction within the political helix of the Inquisition.