Dan Abnett - Eisenhorn Omnibus

'I was trade envoy for the Bonded Merchant Guild of Sinesias/

I knew the name. Guild Sinesias was one of the largest mercantile companies in the sector. It had holdings on a hundred-plus planets and links to the Imperial nobility. It also, as Betancore had informed me just that morning, had a trade launch berthed at the Sun-dome landing stage.

'And what work brought you to Hubris?'

'That same work… as a trade-envoy/

'In Dormant?'

'There is always trade to be had. Long-term contracts with the authorities on this world that require the personal touch.'

'And if I contact your guild, will it confirm this?'

'Of course/

I walked around behind him. 'So what brought you here? To these private apartments?'

'I was a guest/

'Of who?'

'Namber Wylk, a local trader. He invited me for a mid-Dormant feast/

'This dwelling is registered to Namber Wylk/ Fischig put in. 'A trader, as he says, no priors. I don't know him/

What about Eyclone?' I asked Crotes, leaning down to stare into his eyes. There was a ripple of fear in them.

mo?'

'Your real employer. Murdin Eyclone. Don't make me ask you again/

'I don't know any Eyclone!' There was a ring of truth to his voice. He may well not have known Eyclone by that name.

I dragged up a chair and sat down facing him. 'There is an awful lot of your, story that doesn't add up. You're found here consorting with recidivists who we can connect to a planetary conspiracy. There are charges of murder to be considered – a lot of them. We can continue this in far more intimate and comprehensive circumstances, or you can make me like you more by filling in some details now/

'I… don't know what to tell you

Whatever you know. About the Pontius, perhaps?'

A dark, stricken look crossed his face. His jaw worked for a moment, trying to form words. He quivered. Then there was a liquid pop and his head fell forward.

Throne of Light!' Fischig cried.

'Damn it/ I growled, and bent down to lift Crotes's limp skull. He was dead. Eyclone had left failsafes in die conditioning that would trigger at certain subjects. The Pontius evidently was one of those.

'A stroke. Artificially induced/

'So we know nothing?'

We know a great deal? Weren't you listening? For a start we know the Pontius is the most precious secret they protect/

'So tell me about it?'

I was about to, at least evasively, when the shutter barring the far wall to the climate extremes of the world outside the dome blew out. Hidden charges fired simultaneously. The metal sheet splayed outwards into the freezing dark. The blast-force threw both Fischig and myself to the ground.

A millisecond later, the shattered crystal in the portal blew back in at us, carried by the hurricane power of the Dormant winds outside – a blizzard of billions of razor-sharp slivers.

FIVE

Covered traces.

The Glaws of Gudrun.

Unwelcome companions.

Deafened by the blast, I had wit enough left to grab Fischig and roll with him out through the terrace doors as the emergency shutter clanked down from its slit in the hardwood ceiling. We lay panting and half-blind on the terrace, the hard light and warmth of the Sun-dome thawing our cold-shocked bodies.

Alarms and warning bells sounded all along the Thaw-view residences. Arbites units were already on their way.

We got up. Our clothes and simple good fortune had protected us from the worst of the glass-storm, though I had a gash straight down my left cheek that would need closing, and Fischig had a long splinter of glass embedded in his thigh between armour joints. Apart from that, we had just superficial scratches.

'Bad timing?' he asked, though he knew it wasn't.

'The charges were set off by the same spasm that killed Crotes.'

He glanced away and rebuckled one of his gauntlets, giving himself time to think. His face was a dingy grey colour, mainly through shock. But I think he was now beginning to understand the resources and capabilities of the people we worked against. Their abominable crime at Processional Two-Twelve had demonstrated the scale of their malice, but he hadn't seen that first hand. Now he was witnessing the fanatical servants of a dark cause, men who would fight without hesitation to the death. And he had

seen how brutally they would cover their traces, using mental-weapons and brain-wired booby traps that spoke of vast resources and frightening sophistication.

Arbites squads moved into the dwelling and secured it while local med-icae servitors patched our wounds. The clearance squads brought out the shivering girl, Bequin. She was wrapped in blankets and her face was pinched blue with cold. Under my seal and instruction, they placed her in custody. She was too cold to voice a complaint.

Fischig and I re-entered wearing heat-gowns. It would be another two or three hours before engineer teams could replace the outer shutter. From the harsh light of the terrace, we passed through three hastily hung insulation curtains into the dim, blue twilight of the apartment. The far wall was gone and we looked directly into the clear, glassy night of Hubris, a glossy grey landscape of stark shadows and backscattered light stretching away from the edge of the Sun-dome. Once more I was exposed to the piercing cold of Dormant and my blood ached.

The main room where we had questioned Crotes was a gutted cavity, blackened by soot and jewelled with glass. Hard lacquers of frost caked furniture surfaces and twisted the faces of the dead. Blood spilt by the shredding storm of glass was crusted like rubies in the dark.

We played the smoky white beams of our lamps around. I doubted we would find much now. There was a good chance any valuable documents had been set to burn or delete on the same trigger signal that had blown the shutter and killed Crotes. And it also seemed likely these people carried all truly important information internally, as memory engrams, or meme-codes, the sort of techniques usually reserved for the higher echelons of diplomatic corps, the Administratum and elite trade delegations.

That turned my mind back to Crotes's employer, the Guild Sinesias.

'It's a common enough name in this sub-sector/ Aemos told me back in the comfortable half-light of the gun-cutter in its landing platform berth. He had been researching the name 'Pontius'. 'I've turned up over half a million citizens with that forename, another two hundred thousand with it as a middle name, plus another forty or fifty thousand spelling variants.'

He waved a data-slate at me. I brushed it aside, and used a hand mirror to study the line of metal butterfly sutures in the wound in my cheek.

"What about the definite article?'

'I have over nine thousand marks with that connection,' he sighed. He began to read them from his slate list. 'The Pontius Swellwin Youth Academy, The Pontius Praxitelles Translation Bureau, The Pontius Gyvant Ropus Investment Financiary, The Pontius Spiegel Microsurgical Hospi-'

'Enough.' I sat at the codifier, typing in name groups. Flickering runes hunted and darted across the view-plate. Text extracts drifted into focus. I searched through them by eye, my finger resting on the scroll bar.

'Pontius Claw,' I said.

He blinked and looked at me. There was a half-smile of scholarly delight on his narrow face. 'Not on my lists.'

'Because he is dead?'

'Because he's dead.'

Aemos came over and looked across my shoulder at the screen. 'But it makes a sort of sense.'

It did. A kind of illogic that had the flavour of truth. The sort of spore an inquisitor gets a nose for after a few years.

The Glaw family was old blood, a thrusting noble dynasty that had been a main player in this sub-sector for almost a millennium. The primary familial holdings and estates were on Gudrun, a world that had already come to our attention. House Glaw was also a major shareholder and investor in the Regal Bonded Merchant Guild of Sinesias, so the codifier had just revealed to me.