Dan Abnett - Eisenhorn Omnibus

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A WARHAMMER 40,000 OMNIBUS

EISENHORN

DAN ABNETT

A Black Library Publication

Xenos and Malleus copyright © 2001, Games Workshop Ltd.

Hereticus copyright © 2002, Games Workshop Ltd.

Missing in Action first published in Inferno! magazine,

copyright © 2001, Games Workshop Ltd. Backcloth for a Crown Additional

first published in Inferno! magazine, copyright ® 2002, Games Workshop Ltd.

This omnibus edition published in Great Britain in 2004 by

BL Publishing,

Games Workshop Ltd.,

Willow Road , Nottingham ,

NG7 2WS, UK .

10 98765432

Cover illustration by Clint Langley, based on original artwork by Adrian Smith.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, Black Flame, BL Publishing, Games Workshop, the

Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and

images from the Warhammer 40,000 universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop

Ltd 2000-2004, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All

rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN13: 978 1 84416 156 0 ISBN10: 1 84416 156 0

Distributed in the US by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas , New York , NY 10020 , US .

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque, Surrey , UK .

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See the Black Library on the Internet at

www.blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop and the world of Warhammer 40,000 at

www.games-workshop.com

It IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries

the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods,

and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly

with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die. YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold

billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody

regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has

been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of

progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future

there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars,

only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the

laughter of thirsting gods.

Contents

Introduction 8

Xenos 11

Missing in Action 249

Malleus 269

Backcloth for a Crown Additional 511

Hereticus 531

Introduction

Once, when asked where he got his ideas, David Mamet replied, 'I think of them'. In a similar vein, when asked where she got her energy from, my daughter Lily answered, 4Voolworths.' Ba-dum tish!

Rather less quick-witted than either of them, I regularly struggle when I get asked about ideas and their origins, and usually come up with some old cobblers about 'sometimes, if I'm on a train, things just occur to me…' or 'you never know when an idea's going to hit you…'

Because you don't. Owning, as I do, a mind as reliable and watertight as the average game of Ker-Plunk!, I have learned to become something of a note-taker. I jot stuff down, anything, everything, as it occurs to me – yes, on trains, or planes, or sofas, or seesaws, or the queue at Tesco – so I don't lose it. I use notebooks, old envelopes, Post-its, the backs of shopping lists, the foreheads of passing children, whatever's to hand. Then, when I actually need an idea, professionally speaking, I rifle through this scrap-head resource and eventually come up with something that makes me go 'Oh, yeah, that'd work.' Except, of course, for the occasions when I find something that makes me go, 'What is that? A "B"? What's that word? Did I write this?'

So I'm delighted to be able to say that in the case of Eisenhorn (which is the umbrella title we've given to the cycle of novels and linked short stories collected in this spiffy volume), I know exactly where the idea came from. Not me, that's where.

There is a rather gorgeous painting that many of you, I'm sure, will be familiar with. It's called Inquisitor Tannenberg, it's by John Blanche, and it has been reproduced in various places, including the Incjuis Extermi-natus. Know the one? Guy with a scalp full of cables, a black fur coat, a

double-headed eagle familiar on his shoulder, a gold-chased bolt pistol in his hand? Yes, it's is good, isn't it?

I'd been working for the Black Library for a few years, producing a variety of things, most notably the Gaunt's Ghosts novels. So the grim nightmare of the far future, where there is only war and the galaxy's alight and everyone's got a headache, was pretty much my thing. The editors kept me fed with all the latest fluff and hot new supplements, just to keep me in the loop. And one day, they sent me this pile of photocopies: sketches, paste-ups, notes. There was going to be, they told me, a new game called Inquisitor, and they were so jazzed by the concepts and ideas coming out of the game's development, they decided to send me all the stuff, hush-hush, in the hope that it might inspire me, Gaunt-wise.

As soon as I opened the package and started leafing through, I could see what they meant. This was a rich seam indeed, full of wonderful baroque material. Among the pages, along with a number of other very fine pictures, was a copy of John Blanche's painting. And that was it. I picked up the phone, called Black Library and said, 'Can I please write about this?' Even though, truth be told, at that stage I didn't know exactly what 'this' was.

They said yes (I think they sensed the enthusiasm in my voice). The idea was that if I could write the novel quickly enough, it could come out AT THE SAME TIME as the game launch, and everyone would look big and clever, like it had been planned that way all along.