by Dan Abnett
The cryogenerator chamber was vast, its roof reaching up into the pyramidal summit of Processional Two-Twelve. The rambling equipment it contained was ancient and vast. The data-slate given to me in the ice-car had said that the cryogenerators that ran the hibernation tombs of Hubris had originally been constructed to equip the ark-fleet that carried the first colonists to the world. They had been cut and salvaged from the giant arks on arrival, and the stone tombs raised around them. A technomagos brotherhood, descended from the ark-fleet engineers, had kept the cryogenerators operating for thousands of years.
This cryogenerator was sixty metres tall and constructed from cast-iron and copper painted in matt-red lead paint. As it rose, it sprouted branches in the form of conduits and heat-exchangers that intertwined with the roof-vents. The hot air of the room vibrated with the noise of its operation. Smoke and steam wreathed the atmosphere and sweat broke out on my brow and back the moment I stepped through the hatchway.
I looked around and quickly noted where several inspection hatches had been levered away. The red paint was scored and scraped along each frame where a crow-bar had been forced in, and hundreds of years of sacred unguents and lexmechanical sigil-seals applied and tended by the technomagi had been broken.
I peered in through the open covers and saw rows of copper-wound cells, vibrating rack-frames wet with black lubricant, sooty ganglions of
insulated electrical routing and dripping, lagged iron pipes. Sprung-jawed clips with biting metal teeth had been attached to some of the cells, and wiring from these clips trailed back to a small and obviously new ceramite module box taped inside the hatch frame. A digital runic display on the module flashed amber.
This was where Eyclone's men had artificially triggered the revival process. That meant he had either turned and recruited local technomagi or brought in experts from off-world. Either way, this signified considerable resources.
I moved on, and clambered up a ladder frame onto a raised platform of metal grille. There was something else here, a rectangular casket measuring about a metre and a half along its longest edge. It rested on four claw-like feet and had carrying handles built into its sides. The lid was open, and dozens of cables and leads snaked out, linking it to the cryo-generator's electromechanical guts, exposed by another prised-off hatch.
I looked into the casket, but could make little sense of what I saw there: circuit boards and complex mechanical elements linked by sheaves of cable. And there was a space, a padded recess in the heart of the casket's innards, clearly waiting to receive something the size of a clenched fist. Loose cable ends and plugs were taped in place, ready to be connected. But a key component of this mysterious device was evidently missing.
My vox-link chimed in my ear. It was Betancore. I could barely hear him over the noise of the cryogenerator as he made a quick report in Glossia.
'Aegis, heavens uplift, thrice-sevenfold, a crown with stars. Infamous angel without title, to Thorn by eight. Pattern?'
I considered. I was in no mood to take any more chances. 'Thorn, pattern hawk/
'Pattern hawk acknowledged,' he said with relish.
I saw movement from the corner of my eye about a half-second after I broke the link with Betancore: another of Eyclone's black-eyed men, running in through the main hatch with an old-model laspistol raised in his hand.
His first shot, a twinkling ball of pink light, snapped the metal handrail of the platform I stood on with an explosive ping. His second and third passed over me as I dived down, and ricocheted off the cast-iron side of the cryogenerator with scorching crackles.
I returned fire, prone, but the angle was bad. Two more las-shots came my way, one cutting sideways into the edge of the platform deck and cutting a gouge through the grille. The gunman was nearly at the foot of the ladder-frame.
Now a second gunman entered the chamber, calling out after the first, a powerful autorifle in his hands. He saw me, and began to raise the weapon, but I had a cleaner angle on him, and dropped him quickly with two rounds through the upper torso.
The other was almost below me now, and fired a shot that punched dean through the grille just next to my right foot.
I didn't hesitate. I went up and over the rail and directly down onto him. We crashed onto the chamber floor, the powerful impact throwing the Sci-pio out of my grasp despite my efforts to hold onto it. The man was jabbering some insane nonsense into my face and had a good grip on the front of my tunic. I had him by the throat and by the wrist of his gun-hand, forcing the laspistol away. He fired it twice into the ceiling space above.
'Enough!' I commanded, modulating my tone to emphasise my will as I drove it into his mind. 'Drop it!'
He did, meekly, as if surprised. Psyker tricks of will often baffle those who find themselves compelled by them. As he faltered, I threw a punch that connected well and left him unconscious on the floor.
As I bent to recover the Scipio, Betancore voxed me again. Aegis, pattern hawk, infamous angel cast down.'
'Thorn acknowledged. Resume pattern crucible.'
I pushed on after my quarry.
Eyclone made it into the upper vaults and out onto a landing platform built into the sloping side of Processional Two-Twelve. The wind was fierce. Eyclone had eight of his cult with him and they were expecting an orbital pinnace that would carry them away to safety.
They had no way of knowing that, thanks to Betancore, their means of escape was now burning in a deep impact gouge in the permafrost about eight kilometres north.
What rose above the landing platform out of the blizzard night, its down thrusters wailing, was my gun-cutter. Four hundred and fifty tonnes of armoured alloy, eighty metres from barbed nose to raked stern, landing gear still lowered like spider-legs, it rose on the blue-hot downwash of angled jets. Banks of floodlights under its beak-nose cut on and bathed the deck and the cultists in fierce white light.
Panicking, some of them fired up at it.
That was all the cue Betancore needed. His temper was hot, his mind void of anything except the fact that Vibben was dead.
The gun-turrets in the ends of the stubby wings rotated and washed the platform with withering heavy fire. Stone splintered. Bodies were reduced to sprays of liquid.
Eyclone, more intelligent than his men, had sprinted off the platform to the hatch as the gun-cutter rose into view.
And that's where he ran into me.
He opened his mouth in shock and I pushed the muzzle of Vibben's gun into it. I'm sure he wanted to say something important. I didn't care what it was.
I punched the gun so hard into his mouth the trigger guard broke his lower teeth. He tried to reach for something on his belt.
I fired.
Having emptied his brain-case and shattered it into the bargain, the round still had so much force it crossed the deck and pinked off the
armoured nose of the hovering gun-cutter, just below the cockpit window.
'Sorry/ I said.
'Don't worry about it,' Betancore crackled back over the vox-link.
'Most perturbatory,' said Aemos. It was his most frequent expression. He was hunched over, peering down into the casket on the cryogenerator chamber platform. Occasionally, he reached in to tinker with something, or leaned down for a closer look. Gestures such as these made the heavy augmetic eye glasses clamped to his hooked nose make a soft dialling click as they auto-focused.
I stood at his shoulder, waiting, looking down at the back of his old, bald head. The skin was liver-spotted and thin, and a narrow crescent of white hair edged the back of his skull.
Uber Aemos was my savant, and my longest serving companion. He had come into my service in the first month of my career in the Inquisition, bequeathed to me by Inquisitor Hapshant, who was by then dying of cerebral worms. Aemos was two hundred and seventy-eight standard years old, and had provided his services as a savant to three inquisitors before me. He was alive only thanks to significant bionic augmentation to his digestive tract, liver, urinary syst
em, hips and left leg.
In Hapshant's service he had been injured by a stub-round. Tending him, surgeons had found a chronically advanced and previously undiagnosed cancer rampant in his abdomen. Had he not been shot, he would have died within weeks. Thanks to the wound, the disease was found, excised and his body repaired with plastic, ceramite and steel prosthetics.
Aemos referred to the whole ordeal as his 'lucky suffering' and still wore the twisted plug of the stub round that had almost taken and certainly saved his life on a chain around his stringy neck.
Aemos?'
He rose stiffly with a whine of bionics and turned to face me, shaking out the floor length green folds of his embroidered robe. His augmetic eyewear dominated his ancient face. He sometimes reminded me of a curious insect with bulbous eyes and narrow, pinched mouth parts.
A codifier of unique design. A series processor, similar in layout to the mind-impulse units used by the hallowed Adeptus Mechanicus to govern the linkage between human brain and god-machine.'
'You've seen such things?' I asked, a little taken aback.
'Once, in my travels. In passing. I do not pretend to have more than a cursory knowledge. I am certain, however, that the Adeptus Mechanicus would be interested in this device. It may be illicit technology or something derived from apparatus stolen from them. Either way, they would impound it.'
'Either way, they're not going to know about it. This is inquisitional evidence.'
Quite so,' he agreed.
There were distracting noises from below us. Tomb custodians and tech-nomagi from the cryogenerator brotherhood milled about in the chamber, supervising the mammoth and, in my opinion, futile operation to save the sleepers of Processional Two-Twelve. The whole tomb seethed with activity, and the awful screams had not yet died down.
I saw how Aemos watched the work with keen interest, making notes to himself on a data-slate strapped to his wrist. At the age of forty-two, he had contracted a meme-virus that altered his brain function for ever, driving him to collect information – any sort of information – whenever he got the chance. He was pathologically compelled to acquire knowledge, a data-addict. That made him an aggravating, easily sidetracked companion, and a perfect savant, as four inquisitors had discovered.
'Cold-bolted steel cylinders/ he mused, looking up at the heat exchangers. 'Is that to provide stress-durability in temperature change, or was it fabrication expedient? Also, what is the range of temperature change, given-'
'Aemos, please/
'Hmm?' He looked back at me, remembering I was there.
'The casket?'
'Indeed. My apologies. A series processor… did I say that?'
'Yes. Processing what? Data?'
'I thought that at first, then I considered some mental or mental-transference process. But I doubt either now I've studied it/
I pointed down into the casket. 'What's missing?'
'Oh, you noticed that too? This is most perturbatory. I'm still not certain, of course, but it's something angular, non-standard in shape and with its own power source/
'You're sure?'
'There are no power inlets designed to couple to it, only power outlets. And there's something curious about the plugs. Non-standard mating. It's all non-standard/
'Xenos?'
'No… human, just non-standard, custom made/
'Yeah, but what for?' asked Betancore, climbing up the ladder frame to join us. He looked sour, his unruly black curls framing a dark-skinned, slender face that was usually alive with genial mischief.
'I need to make further evaluations, Midas/ said Aemos, hunching back over the casket.
Betancore stared my way. He was as tall as me, but lighter in build. His boots, breeches and tunic were made of soft black leather with red piping, the old uniform of a Glavian pilot-hunter, and over that he wore, as always, a short jacket of cerise silk with iridescent embroidery panels.
His hands were gloved in light bllek-hide, and seemed to wait ominously near the curved grips of the needle pistols holstered on his hips.
'You took a long time getting here/ I began.
They made me take the cutter back to the landing cross at Tomb Point. Said they need the platform here for emergency flights. I had to walk back. Then I saw to Lores/
'She died well, Betancore/
'Maybe. Is that possible?' he added.
I made no reply. I knew how deep his foul moods could be. I knew he had been in love with Lores Vibben, or at least had decided he was in love with her. I knew things would get difficult with Betancore before they got better.
ЧУЬеге is this off-worlder? This Eisenhorn?'
The demanding voice rolled up from the chamber below us. I looked down. A man had entered the cryogenerator chamber escorted by four custodians in heat-gowns, carrying light-poles aloft. He was tall, with pallid skin and greying hair, though his haughty bearing spoke of self-possession and arrogance. He wore a decorative ceremonial heat-gown of bold yellow. I didn't know who he was, but he looked like trouble to me.
Aemos and Betancore were watching him too.
'Any ideas as to who this is?' I asked Aemos.
'Well, you see, the yellow robes, like the light poles carried by the custodians, symbolises the return of the sun and thus heat and light. It denotes a high-ranking official of the Dormant Custodial Committee/
'I got that much myself/ I muttered.
'Oh, well his name is Nissemay Carpel, and he's High Custodian, so you should address him as such. He was born here, on Vital 235, fifty standard years ago, the son of a-'
'Enough! I knew we'd get there eventually/
I walked to the rail and looked down. 'I am Eisenhorn/
He stared up at me, barely contained wrath bulging the veins in his neck.
'Place him under arrest/ he told his men.
THREE
Nissemay Carpel.
A light in endless darkness.
The Pontius.
Ishot one, meaningful glance at betancore to stay his hand, then calmly walked past him, slid down the ladder frame and approached Carpel. The custodians closed in around me, but at a distance.
'High custodian,' I nodded.
He fixed me with a steady but wary gaze and licked spittle off his thin lips. 'You will be detained until-'
'No/ I replied. 'I am an inquisitor of the God-Emperor of Mankind, Ordo Xenos. I will co-operate in any investigation you bring to bear here, fully and completely, but you will not and cannot detain me. Do you understand?'
'An… inquisitor?'
'Do you understand?' I repeated. I wasn't using my will at all, not yet. 1 would if I had to. But I trusted that he would have the sense to listen to me first. He could make things awkward for me, but I could make things intolerable for him.
He seemed to soften a little. As I had judged, part of his rage came from shock at this incident, shock that so many planetary nobles in his care had suffered. He was looking for somewhere to pin the blame. Now he had to temper that with the idea that he was dealing with a member of the most feared institution in the Imperium.
'Thousands are dead/ he began, a tremor in his voice. This desecration.. . the high born of Hubris, violated by a… by a-'
'A murderer, a follower of darkness, a man who, thanks to me, lies dead now under a plastic sheet on the upper landing platform. I mourn the great loss Hubris has suffered tonight, high custodian, and I wish I had been able to prevent it. But if I had not been here at all to raise the alarm… well imagine the tragedy you would be dealing with then/
I letthat sink in.
'Not just this processional, but all the hibernation tombs… who knows what Eyclone might have wrought? Who knows what his overall ambition was?'
'Eyclone, the recidivist?'
'He did this, high custodian/
You will brief me on this entire event/
'Let me prepare a report and bring it to you. You may have answers for me too. I will signal you in a few hours for an appointment
to meet. I think you have plenty to deal with right now/
We made our way out. Betancore presented the junior custodians with a formal register of evidence to be stored for my inspection. The list included the casket and the bodies of Eyclone and his men. None would be tampered with or even searched until I had looked at them. The gunman I had subdued in the cryogenerator chamber, the only one left alive, would be incarcerated pending my interrogation. Betancore made these requirements abundantly clear.
We took Vibben with us. Aemos was too frail, so Betancore and I handled the plastic-shrouded form on the gurney.
We left Processional Two-Twelve by the main vault doors into the biting cold of the constant night and carried Vibben down towards a waiting ice-car, taking her through the hundreds of rows of corpses the Custodians were laying out on the frozen ground.
My band and I had deployed onto Hubris the moment we arrived, such was the urgency of our chase. Now it looked like we would remain here for at least a week, longer if Carpel proved difficult. As we rode the ice-car back to the landing cross, I had Aemos make arrangements for our stay.
During Dormant on Hubris, while ninety-nine percent of the planetary population hibernates, one location remains active. The custodians and the technomagi weather out the long, bitter darkness in a place called the Sun-dome.
Fifty kilometres from the vast expanse of the Dormant Plains where the hibernation tombs stand in rows, the Sun-dome sits like a dark grey blister in the ongoing winter night. It is home to fifty-nine thousand people, just a town compared with the great empty cities that slumber below the horizon line waiting for Thaw to bring their populations back.
I stared out at the Sun-dome as the gun-cutter swept us in towards it through wind-blown storms of ice. Small red marker lights winked on the surfaces of the dome and from the masts jutting from the apex.
Betancore flew, silent, concentrating. He had removed his tight-fitting gloves so that the intricate Glavian circuitry set like silver inlay into his palms and finger tips could engage with the cutter's system directly via the control stick.
