Eisenhorn Omnibus by Dan Abnett
‘You’ve double-checked everything? No more bugs to be found?’
He shook his head. ‘Lord, I can only apologise for—’
I held tip a hand. ‘No need, Kircher. You’ve done your job. Show me what they left.’
KIRCHER UNROLLED A red felt cloth across the top of a table in the quiet of the inner library. He was nervous, and beads of sweat were trickling down from his crest-like shock of white hair.
I hadn’t wanted to alarm anyone, so I had asked only Ravenor and Aemos to join us. The room smelled of teak from the shelves, must from the books, and ozone from the suspension fields sustaining especially frail manuscripts.
The felt was laid out. On it lay nine tiny devices, six vox-thieves and three farcoders, each one set in a pearl of solid plastic.
‘Once I’d stripped them out, I sealed them in inert gel to make sure they were dead. None were booby trapped.’
Gideon Ravenor stepped in and picked up one of the sealed vox-thieves, holding it up to the light.
‘Imperial,’ he said. ‘Unmarked, but Imperial. Very high grade and advanced.’
‘I thought so too,’ said Kircher.
‘Military? Secular?’ I asked.
Ravenor shrugged. ‘We could source them to likely manufacturers, but they likely supply all arms of the Imperium.’
Aemos’s augmetic optics clicked and turned as he peered down at the objects on the cloth. ‘The farcoders,’ he began, ‘similarly advanced. It takes singular skill to patch one of these successfully into a comm-node.’
‘It takes singular skill to break in like they did,’ I countered.
‘They have no maker markings, but they’re clearly refined models from the Amplox series. Much more refined than the heavy-duty units the military use. It’s just conjecture, but I’d say this was beyond the Ministorum too. They’re notoriously behind when it comes to tech advancements.’
‘Who then?’ I asked.
‘The Adeptus Mechanicus?’ he ventured. I scowled.
He shrugged, smiling. ‘Or at least a body with the power and influence to secure such advanced devices from the Adeptus Mechanicus.’
‘Like?’
‘The Officio Assassinorum?’
‘Who would break in to kill, not listen.’
‘Noted. Then a powerful Imperial house, one with clout in the Senatorum Imperialis.’
‘Possible…’ I admitted.
‘Or…’ he said.
‘Or?’
‘Or the one Imperial institution that regularly employs such devices and has the prestige and determination to make sure it is using the best available equipment.’
‘That being?’
Aemos looked at me as if I was stupid.
‘The Inquisition, of course.’
I SLEPT BADLY, fitfully. Three hours before the end of the night cycle, I sat up in my bed, suddenly, coldly awake.
Dressed only in the sheet I had wrapped around me, I stalked out into the hall, my grip firm on the matt-grey snub pistol that lived in a holster secured behind my headboard.
Dim blue light filtered through the hallway, softening the edges of everything. I crept forward.
I was not mistaken. Someone was moving about down below, in the lower foyer.
I edged down the stairs, gun braced, willing my eyes to accustomise to the gloom.
I thought to hit a vox and alert Kircher and his staff, but if someone was inside, skilful enough to get past the alarms, then I wanted to capture him, not scare him off with a full blown alert. In the few hours since I had arrived back at the Ocean House, a nasty taste of treachery had seeped into my world. It might be largely paranoia, but I wanted an end to it.
A beam of white light stabbed across the foyer floor from the half open kitchen doors. I heard movement again.
I sidled to the doorframe, checked the safety was off, and slid, weapon first, through the gap in the doors.
The outer kitchen, a realm of marble-topped workbays and scrubbed aluminium ranges, was empty. Metal pots and utensils hung silently from ceiling racks. There was a smell of garlic and cooked herbs in the still air. The light was on in the inner pantry, near the cold store, and the illuminated backwash filled the room.
Two steps, three, four. The kitchen’s stone floor was numbingly cold under my bare feet. I reached the door to the inner pantry. There was movement inside.
I kicked the door open and leapt inside, aiming the compact sidearm.
Medea Betancore, clad only in a long, ex-military undershirt, roared out in surprise and dropped the tray of leftover ketelfish she had been gorging on. The tray clattered on the tiled floor in front of the open larder.
‘Great gods alive, Eisenhorn!’ she wailed in outrage, jumping up and down on the spot. ‘Don’t do that!’
I was angry. I didn’t immediately lower my aim. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Eating? Hello?’ She sneered at me. ‘Feel like I’ve been asleep for a week. I’m famished.’
I began to lower the gun. A sense of embarrassment began to filter into my wired state.
‘I’m sorry. Sorry. You should… maybe… get dressed before you come down to raid the larder.’ It sounded stupid even as I said it. I didn’t realise how stupid until a moment later. I was too painfully aware of her long, dark legs and the way the singlet top was curved around the proud swell of her bust.
‘You should take your own advice… Gregor,’ she said, raising one eyebrow.
I looked down. I had lost the sheet kicking open the door. I was what Midas Betancore used to call ‘very naked’.
Except, of course, for the loaded gun.
‘Damn. My apologies.’ I turned to scrabble for the fallen sheet.
‘Don’t stand on my account,’ she sniggered.
I froze, stooped. The muzzle of a Tronsvasse parabellum was pointing directly at my head from the darkness behind me.
It lowered. Harlon Nayl looked me up and down for a moment in frank dismay and then raised a warning finger to his lips. He was fully clothed, damn him.
I retrieved my sheet.
‘What?’ I hissed.
‘Someone’s in. I can feel it,’ he whispered. ‘The noise you two were making, I thought it was the intruder. Didn’t know you were so keen on Medea.’
‘Shut up.’
The two of us fanned out back through the outer kitchen. Nayl pulled up the hood of his vulcanised black bodyglove to cover his pale, shaved head. He was a big man, a head taller than me, but he melted away into the darkness. I watched carefully for his signals.
Nayl waved me left down the hall. I trusted his judgment completely. He had stalked the galaxy’s most innovative and able scum for three decades. If there were intruders, he’d find them.
I entered the Ocean House’s main hall, and saw the front entry was ajar. The code display on the main lock was blinking a default of zeros.
I swung round as a gun roared behind me. I heard Nayl cry out and sprinted back into the inner foyer. Nayl was on the floor, grappling with an unidentifiable man.
‘Get up! Get up! I’m armed!’ I shouted.
In reply, the unknown intruder smacked Nayl’s head back against the floor so hard he knocked him out, and then threw Nayl’s heavy sidearm at me.
I fired, once, and blew a hole in the wall. The spinning gun clipped my temple and knocked me over.
I heard a series of fleshy cracks and impacts, a guttural gasp and then Medea Betancore’s voice shouting, ‘Lights up!’
I rose. She was standing astride the intruder, one hand braced in a fierce fist, the other pulling down her undershirt for modesty.
‘I got him,’ she said, glancing round at me.
The dazed intruder was clad in black from head to foot. I wrenched off his hood.
It was Titus Endor.
‘Gregor,’ he lisped through a bloody mouth. ‘You did say you were home.’
FOUR
Between friends.
An interview with Lord Rorken.
‘GRAIN JOILIQ, WITH shaved ice, and a sliver of citrus.’
Seated in my sanctum chamber, Endor took the proffered drink and grinned at me. ‘You remembered.’
‘Many were the nights, in those fine old days. Titus, I’ve mixed your drink of choice too many times to count.’
‘Hah! I know. What was that place, the one off Zansiple Street? Where the host used to drink the profits?’
‘The Thirsty Eagle,’ I replied. He knew full well. It was as if he was testing me.
‘The Thirsty Eagle, that’s it! Many were the nights, as you say.’
He held up his tumbler of clear, iced spirits.
‘Raise ’em and sink ’em and let’s have another!’
I echoed the old toast and clinked my lead-crystal of vintage amasec against his glass.
For a moment, it was indeed like the fine old days. Both of us, nineteen years old, full of piss and promethium, newly promoted interrogators ready to take on the whole damn galaxy, students of old Inquisitor Hapshant. Five years later, almost simultaneously, we would both be elected full inquisitors, and our individual careers would begin in earnest.
Nineteen years old, drunk on our feet, carousing in an armpit of a bar off Zansiple Street after hours, mocking our illustrious mentor and bonding for life, bonding with that unquestioning exuberance that seems to me now only possible in youth.
It was like regarding a different life, so far away, almost unrecoverable. I was not that Gregor Eisenhorn. And this man, with his long, braided grey hair and scarred face, sitting in my sanctum dressed in a body-heat masking stealth suit, was not that Titus Endor.
‘You could have called,’ I began.
‘I did.’
I shrugged. ‘You could have joined us for dinner tonight. Jarat excelled herself again.’
‘I know. But then…’ he paused, and rattled the ice around in his drink thoughtfully. ‘But then, it might have become known that Inquisitor Endor had visited Inquisitor Eisenhorn.’
‘It is well known that those two are old friends. Why would that have been a problem?’
Endor set down his drink, unpopped the fasteners around his waistband and pulled the top half of his stealth suit up over his head. He cast the garment aside.
‘Too hot,’ he remarked. His undershirt was dark with sweat. The jagged saurapt tooth still hung around his neck on a black cord. That tooth. Years ago, I’d dug it out of his leg after he had driven the beast off. Brontotaph, twelve decades ago and more. The pair of us, alongside Hapshant, in the mist-meres.
‘I’ve come for the Novena,’ he said. ‘I was summoned to attend by Orsini’s staff, like you I imagine. I wanted to talk to you, talk to you as far off the record as was possible.’
‘So you broke into my house?’
He sighed deeply, finished his drink and walked over to the spirit stand in the corner of the room to fix another.
‘You’re in trouble,’ he said.
‘Really? Why is that?’
He looked round, peeling strips of citrus rind off a fruit with a paring knife.
‘I don’t know. But there are rumblings.’
‘There are always rumblings.’
He turned to face me fully. His eyes were suddenly very hard and bright. ‘Take this seriously.’
‘Very well, I will.’
‘You know what the rumour-mill is like. Someone’s always got a point to make, a score to settle. There were stories. I dismissed them at first.’
‘Stories?’
He sighed again and returned to his seat with his refreshed drink.
‘There is talk that you are… unsound.’
‘What talk?’
‘Damn it, Gregor! I’m not one of your interview suspects! I’ve come here as a friend.’
‘A friend who broke in wearing a stealth suit and—’
‘Shut up just for a minute, would you?’
I paused.
‘Gladly. If you cut to the chase.’
‘The first I heard, someone was bad-mouthing you.’
‘Who?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I waded in and told them just what I thought. Then I heard the story again. Eisenhorn’s unsound. He’s lost the plot.’
‘Really?’
‘Then the stories changed. It was no longer “Eisenhorn’s unsound”, it was, “The people who matter think Eisenhorn’s unsound”. As if somehow suspicion of you had become official.’
‘I’ve heard nothing,’ I said, sitting back.
‘Of course you haven’t. Who’d say it to your face but a friend… or a convening judge from Internal Prosecution?’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘You’re really worried, aren’t you, Titus?’
‘Damn right. Someone’s gunning for you. Someone who’s got the ear of the upper echelon. Your career and activities are under scrutiny.’
‘You get that all from rumours? Come on, Titus. There are plenty of inquisitors I can think of who’d like to score points off me. Orsini’s a closet Monodominant, and the puritan idealists are forming a power block around him. They are radicals, in their way. You know that. Us Amalathians are too louche for their tastes.’
I mentioned before how I hated politics. Nothing is more fruitless and wearying than the internal politics of the Inquisition itself. My kind is fractured internally by belief factions and intellectual sectarianism. Endor and myself count ourselves as Amalathian inquisitors, which is to say we hold an optimistic outlook and work to sustain the integrity of the Imperium, believing it to be functioning according to the divine Emperor’s scheme. We preserve the status quo. We hunt down recidivist elements: heretics, aliens, psykers, the three key enemies of mankind – these are of course our primary targets – but we will set ourselves against anything that we perceive to be destabilising Imperial society, up to and including factional infighting between the august organs of our culture. It has always struck me as ironic that we had to become a faction in order to fight factionalism.
We profess to be puritans, and certainly are so compared to the extreme radical factions of the Inquisition such as the Istvaanians and the Recongregators.
But equally alien to us are the extreme right wing of the puritan factions, the Monodominants and the Thorians, some of whom believe even the use of trained psykers to be heretical.
If I was in trouble, it would not be the first time an inquisitor of tempered, moderate beliefs had run foul of either extreme in his own organisation.
‘This goes beyond simple faction intrigue,’ Titus said quietly. ‘This isn’t a hardliner deciding to give the moderates a going over. This is particular to you. They have something.’
‘What?’
‘Something concrete on you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because twenty days ago on Messina, I was detained and questioned by Inquisitor Osma of the Ordo Malleus.’
I suddenly realised I was up out of my seat.
‘You were what?’
He waved dismissively. ‘I’d just finished a waste-of-time matter, and was preparing to pack up and ship for Thracian. Osma contacted me, polite and friendly, and asked if he could meet with me. I went to see him. It was all very civil. He made no effort to restrain me… but I don’t think I could have left before he had finished. He was guarded, but he made it clear that if I decided to walk out… his people would stop me.’
‘That’s outrageous!’
‘No, that’s Osma. You’ve met him surely? One of Orsini’s. Bezier’s right-hand man. Thorian to the marrow. He makes a point of getting what he’s after.’
‘And what did he get?’
‘From me?’ Endor laughed. ‘Not a thing, except for a glowing character reference! He allowed me to leave after an hour. The bastard even suggested we might meet and dine together, socially, during the Novena.’
‘Osma is a skilled operator. Slippery. So… that begs the question, what did he want?’
‘He wanted y
‘It’s all lies,’ I told him.
‘What is?’
‘I don’t know. Whatever they think. Whatever they fear. I’ve done nothing that deserves the attention of the Ordo Malleus.’
‘I believe you, Gregor,’ Endor said, in a way that suggested to me he undoubtedly did not.
WE TOOK FRESH drinks onto the sea terrace. He looked out at the kaleidoscopic swirls of luminous plankton and said, ‘They’ve only just begun.’
I nodded and looked down at the drink cradled in my hands.
‘On Lethe… Tantalid came after me. I supposed at the time it was old scores, but from what you’ve said tonight, I doubt that now.’
‘Be careful,’ he murmured. ‘Look, Gregor, I should go. This should have been a better reunion of old friends.’
‘I want to thank you for the chance you took. The effort you made to bring this to me.’
‘You’d do the same.’
‘I would. One last thing… how did you get in?’
He looked round at me sharply.
‘What?’
‘In here? Tonight?’
‘I used a code scrambler on the door.’
‘You diverted the alarms.’
‘I’m not a novice, Gregor. My scrambler was set to trigger a nulling cascade effect through the system.’
‘That’s quite a piece of kit. May I see it?’
He took a small black pad from his hip-pocket and passed it to me.
‘An Amplox model,’ I noted. ‘Quite advanced.’