[Eisenhorn 01] - Xenos by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett [Abnett, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-03-10T14:20:43+00:00

Thirteen

Damask.

North Qualm.

Sanctum.

Under a leaden, rusty sky, the ball-tree forests followed the wind.

They looked like thick herds of bulbous livestock, surging across the rolling sweeps of scree, and the jostling, clattering noise they made sounded like hooves.

But they were trees: pustular, fronded globes of cellulose swelled by lighter-than-air gases generated from decomposition processes deep inside them. They drifted in the wind and dragged heavy, trailing root systems behind them. Occasionally, the pressure of one ball-tree against another caused a gas-globe to vent with a moaning squeal forced out through fibrous sphincters. Plumes of gas wafted above the tree herd.

I climbed to the top of a low plateau, where the bluish flint and gravel were caked in yellowish lichens. A couple of solitary ball-trees, small juveniles, scudded across the hill’s flat summit. In the centre of the plateau’s top stood a rockcrete pylon marker, commemorating the original landing place of the first settlers who had come to Damask. The elements had all but worn away the inscription. Standing by the marker, I slowly turned and took in the landscape. Black flint hills to the west, thick ball-tree forests in the wide river valley to the north, leagues of thorn-woods to the east, near to where we had set down, and grumbling, fire-topped volcanoes to the south, far away, sooting the sky with threads of sulphurous brown smoke. Clouds of small air-grazers circled over the forests, preparing to roost for the night. A surly, scarred moon was rising, distorted by the thick amber atmosphere.

‘Eisenhorn,’ Midas called over the vox.

I walked back down the plateau slope, buttoning my leather coat against the evening breeze. Midas and Fischig waited by the landspeeder that they had spent the past two hours unstowing and reassembling from the gun-cutter’s hold. It was an old, unarmed model and it hadn’t been used for three years. Midas was closing an engine cowling.

‘You’ve got it working, then,’ I said.

Midas shrugged. ‘It’s a piece of crap. I had to get Uclid to strip in new relays. All manner of cabling had perished.’

Fischig looked particularly unimpressed with the vehicle.

I seldom had a use for it. On most worlds, local transport was available. I hadn’t expected Damask to be so… unpopulated.

Records said there were at least five colony settlements, but there had been no sign of any from orbit, and no response to vox or astropathical messages. Had the human population of Damask withered and died in the past five years since records were filed?

We’d left Aemos, Bequin and Lowink with the cutter, which had put down on the shores of a wide river basin. We’d carefully disguised it with camouflage netting. Midas had chosen a landing site within speeder range of some of the colony locations, yet far enough out to avoid being seen by anybody at those locations as we made descent. Tobius Maxilla awaited our pleasure aboard the Essene in high orbit above.

Midas fired up the speeder’s misfiring engines and we moved off overland from the hidden cutter towards the last recorded position of the closest human settlement.

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