Eisenhorn Omnibus

factory.

With the alarms sounding and warning lights flashing, the line had come to a halt, and the workers were looking around, liquid cellulose and sap dripping off their gauntlets, overalls and work tools.

I blundered through them, overseers shouting at me from gantry stations far above. I could see Lyko, thirty metres away down the line, pushing through with one last gunman and a bound, visored figure that could only be Esarhaddon.

The gunmen turned and fired at me down the length of the line vault. Three workers crumpled, one spilling over onto the belt. The shots spanged sparks off the metal walkways and machinery.

As the other workers dived for cover, I dropped to my knee and reached for my boltgun. It wasn't there. In fact, the entire holster was ripped open. I wasn't sure when I lost it: during Cherubael's assault or slamming off the hull of the harvester, but it was long gone. And my beloved power sword had been disintegrated on contact with the daemonhost.

More shots whizzed down the work-line and dented the metal facings of the belt-drivers. I crawled into cover behind a drum of hydrobac tool-wash.

I pulled my back-up weapon from the ankle-holster built into the side of my boot. It was a compact, short-frame auto with a muzzle so short it barely extended beyond the trigger guard. The handgrip was actually longer than the barrel, and contained a slide-magazine of twenty small-calibre rounds.

Selecting single-fire, I cracked off a couple of shots. The aim was lousy and the power poor. It really was meant to be a close-range last ditch.

The gunman down the line, undeterred by my pathetic display, switched over to full auto and raked the deck area and working space beside the stationary belt. Workers, all pressing themselves into cover, began to scream and yell.

The shooting stopped. I dared a look out. There was a clunk and a whirr and the conveyor started moving again.

The gunman was following his departing master again. Lyko was almost out of sight, pushing his captive ahead of him.

Why was Esarhaddon a captive, I wondered? I still didn't understand the relationship between Lyko, the psyker and Cherubael.

I ran on. The gunman, Lyko and his captive psyker had all disappeared through a bulkhead door. To follow them, I'd have to go in blind. And if I'd been in Lyko's place, I'd have used the bulkhead as a point to turn and wait.

My gut readings of his actions had not been wrong so far.

I leapt up onto the wide conveyor belt, ignoring the shouts of the cowering work crew, and slithered across it through the matted, sticky crop load. The sap and the moving belt made it nigh on impossible to stay upright. For a moment, I thought I might slip and be carried along under the nearest roller press.

I leapt off the far side onto the solid deck, dripping with green mush and vegetal fluid. Now I was following the work-line down the other side of the wide conveyor, which divided the harvester centrally.

There was a bulkhead door on this side, too.

I went through it, low.

The gunman was waiting behind the other door on the far side of the moving belt. He saw me, cursed, and turned with his autocannon. I was firing already. Even at this shorter range, the pathetic stopping power of my auto was evident. His drum-barrelled autocannon was about to roar out my doom.

I dived headlong, thumbing my weapon to auto and ripped off the entire clip of small slugs in a shrill, high-pitched chatter.

What I lacked in power I made up for in numbers. I hit him six or seven times in the left arm and collar and staggered him backwards, his bonded armour torn open. The heavy cannon flew out of his hands and landed on the moving belt between us to be carried out of view.

He was far from dead, though he was bleeding profusely from the multiple small calibre grazes and impacts. He was probably glanding some stimm that kept his edge.

Snarling a Necromundan oath, he drew a military-issue las-pistol from his webbing, and climbed up on the work-line foot rail on his side of the rolling belt to get a better angle at me. I threw the empty gun at him and made him duck, and then grabbed one of the hose-suspended work lances hanging by the line-edge.

He got off a shot that barely missed my shoulder. I swung the lance at him, the chain-blade tip chittering, reaching out across the belt. But it was hard to manipulate it with one wrist smashed.

So I turned the swing into a throw and launched the long tool like a harpoon.

The chain-tip impaled him and he died still screaming and trying to drag the industrial cutter from his chest. As he went limp, the tension in the rubberised power-hose pulled the lance back towards its rest hook on my side of the line, dragging the body onto the conveyor. The belt carried it along as far as the hose would allow, and then it stuck fast, the belt moving under it.

Piles of wet plant fibre began damming up against it and spilling over onto the floor.

Eisenhorn, a voice said in my mind.

I wheeled round and saw Lyko standing on a grilled gantry that formed a walk- bridge over the belt. The plasma gun he had used to burn the fake

Esarhaddon was aimed at me. I could see the battered psyker, his head still masked and visored, lashed to a wall-pipe on die far side of the line.

You should have left well alone, Eisenhorn. You should never have come after me.

I'm doing my job, you bastard. What were you doing?

What had to be done. What needs to be done.

He came down the walk-bridge and stepped towards me. There was a hunted, terrified look in his face.

And what needs to be done?

Silence.

Why, Lyko? The atrocity on Thracian… how could you have allowed that? Been part of it?

I… I didn't know! I didn't know what they were going to do.

Who?

He squashed my cheek with the muzzle of his potent weapon.

'No more/ he said, speaking for the first time.

'If you're going to kill me, just do it. I'm surprised you haven't already'

'I need to know something first. Who knows? Who knows what you know?'

'About you and your little pact with the daemonscum? About your theft of an alpha-plus class psyker? That you stood by while millions died on Thracian? Hah!' Everyone. I added the answer psychically for emphasis. Everyone. I informed Rorken and Orsini himself before I left on your trail

'No! There would have been more than just you after me…'

There is.'

'You're lying! You're alone…'