The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit
- Автор: МакНилл Грэхем
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd.
- ISBN: 978-1-78251-547-0
- Жанр: Боевая фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit». Краткое содержание книги:
ABOUT THIS EDITION
Includes 4 specially commissioned illustrations by Tiernen Trevallion, as well as an exclusive afterword by the author.
She had known that Horus would find this place eventually, but he had found it quicker than she’d hoped. She’d never agreed with the decision to obscure the existence and nature of the warp, but if Alivia’s long life had taught her anything, it was that finger-pointing after the fact was beyond futile.
Four Ultramarines stood with her and her bodyguards, a living shieldwall of flesh and ceramite. This was the only place mortals could survive – being without armour in the midst of a Legion firefight was a sure-fire way to end up dead.
Castor Alcade oathed the warriors protecting her little band to fight as though the Emperor Himself stood behind them.
These men would die for her.
They weren’t the first to do so, but she dearly hoped they’d be the last.
An explosion shook the chamber and she coughed on the acrid propellant fumes. She could taste aerosolised blood misting the air. Not good. Especially with the aggression flaring from every man in the chamber. Ultramarines were all about their practical, but they had sacrificed too much to fight clinically with the cause of their hurt so close.
Alivia breathed deeply, picturing Vivyen and Miska. Even Jeph, with his sad, hangdog eyes and absurd belief that he had to protect her. She missed them, and hoped Molech’s Enlightenment was already accelerating towards the system’s Mandeville point.
No, that wasn’t helping. She needed something more, something cherished. She remembered when the auspex of a trans-loader from Ophir had failed and it ran into a submerged mine in Larsa’s harbour. She hadn’t been on the ship, but had seen it go down with all hands. Only when she returned home did she find out that Vivyen and Miska thought she’d been aboard, and they’d wept for hours believing that she was dead.
She remembered her arms wrapped around them both when they finally succumbed to sleep. Their warm breath and the smell of their hair reminded Alivia of a time long gone, of a life now ended, when she’d been blissfully ignorant of her true nature and the doom approaching Arcadia.
She had been happy then, and she used that to push down the violent thoughts intruding on her psyche. Alivia pictured the symbols she’d been shown: precise arrangements of intersecting lines that couldn’t possibly intersect; curves that broke every established rule of calculus; the geometry of the insane.
She spoke the words that weren’t words, pouring every inch of her desire to see this gate sealed into what she was doing. Her hands described the motions she pictured, moving across the surface of the smooth black barrier.
It looked and felt like a solid barrier, but it wasn’t.
It was a scab over a hole that should never have been torn open, an impossible object that existed in an infinite number of possible existences. It was neither real nor unreal.
A doorway to hell Alivia now attempted to unmake.
Her surroundings faded to grey, a monochrome facsimile of the world where she was the only splash of colour. She heard gunfire, screams of pain and explosions. All were muted and dulled, as though coming from a distant battlefield.
Her hands were radiant, leaving echoes of warp light in their wake. A pattern began to emerge, disjointed knowledge seeded throughout her psyche coming together in a multi-dimensional lattice that was part unbreakable seal, part demo charge.
She smiled, seeing the cunning that had gone into its design, the care it had taken to hide within her. So intricate was its construction, she almost didn’t mind being used like this.
She certainly didn’t mind that its completion would kill her.
A spray of blood drenched Alivia and she cried out as one of her protectors dropped with a hole blown through the cobalt-blue of his breastplate. A concussive pressure wave hit her and slammed her to the ground. A spinning fragment of hot metal sliced across her shoulder. Pain blazed as blood ran down her back.
Her surroundings bled back into her awareness. The noise, the fear and the choking clouds of smoke. She heard heavy footfalls, all thudding in unison. Short, tramping steps and the scrape of iron on stone. Alivia rolled onto her side, blinking away tears of pain from her shoulder.
Her left arm felt useless and the stink of burned meat filled her senses. Valance lay on his back next to her. He’d taken the brunt of the blast that had knocked her to the ground. What was left of him was only recognisable by the half of his head that remained.
She looked up in time to see a ridged line of interlocking shields barge its way into the chamber. Sons of Horus with breacher’s shields. The Ultramarines couldn’t hope to hold their position, scattered by the missile explosions and overwhelmed by suppressive volleys.
Concentrated bursts of fire took them down in twos and threes.
The shield line widened as the chamber opened up. Sons of Horus warriors following behind pushed the line out and brought yet more guns to bear.
Arcadon Kyro put a hole in the shield line with coordinated blasts from the plasma one-shots on his mechanised arms. Each bolt impacted at precisely the same time, and blew apart one of the shields and the warrior behind it.
Massed bolter fire brought him down, a ridiculous amount of overkill that shredded his flesh unrecognisable and thoroughly dismantled his mechanical augmentations. Didacus Theron and Castor Alcade pushed into the gap Kyro had opened, looking to tear it wider.
Theron’s power sword cleaved through a shield and the arm holding it. His bolt pistol fired point-blank into the face of a Terminator. Such hulking war-monstrosities all but eliminated the need for mortal flesh entirely. The bolts detonated on impact, but left the warrior beneath unharmed.
The Terminator’s crackling energy-fist pistoned out and rammed through the centurion’s body. He came apart in an explosion of disembodied limbs and shattered plate.
Alivia tried to drag herself back to the gate, pushing along the floor on her backside with her heels.
Her work was almost done. Just a little more and her obligation would be over. No more long, wearying years, no more lies and isolation. No more anything.
A towering figure broke free of the shield line.
A giant, a demigod, a beautiful avatar of all that humanity could achieve in greatness. She’d heard all these epithets and more used to describe the Warmaster, but they’d been coined by those viewing him at peace.
Seeing him in battle was something entirely different.
Horus Lupercal was a monster. A daemon of war and ruin made flesh. He was a destroyer, an unmaker and the face of all humanity ought to have turned its back on millennia ago.
His was the face of uttermost evil...
And he didn’t even know it.
It was the worst thing Alivia had ever seen.
Castor Alcade vaulted away from the Terminator bearing down on him and ran to put himself between her and the Warmaster. There was no way Alcade could defeat the Warmaster, no hope of even a fair contest.
Alcade was dead the moment he moved, but he did it anyway.
It was the best thing Alivia had ever seen.
The legate of the XIII Legion thrust with his gladius.
It snapped on the amber eye at Horus’s breast.
The Warmaster’s titanic maul swept out and Castor Alcade was obliterated as though he had never existed.
Alivia pushed onto her feet and threw herself at the gate, her hands slippery with blood. She traced the final lines and opened her mouth to speak the last of the apotropaic words.