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.
Every one of those berths was filled twice over. About a third of the soldiers they carried were dead. Kjell kept urging her to ditch the corpses, but Noama would sooner throw herself out the back than abandon her boys like that. Her surgeon-captain’s uniform was supposed to be pale green, but was soaked in blood from the chest down. Ruby droplets dotted lined mahogany skin that was too pale from too little sleep and too many long days in the medicae wards. Eyes that had seen too many boys die were heavy with regret and remembered every one of them.
The Galenus Mobile Medicus was a heavy tracked vehicle as wide and long as a superheavy. But unlike pretty much every other superheavy she knew, it had a decent kick to its engine. That could usually get the wounded out of harm’s way, but there were still plenty of things that could move faster than them.
Nothing she could do about that, so instead she concentrated on the matter in hand.
She and Lieutenant Kjell had pulled the soldier from the wreck of a Baneblade whose engine exploded ninety kilometres south of Avadon. Tags said his name was Nyks, and his youthful eyes reminded her of her son serving off-world in the 24th Molech Firescions.
Those same eyes begged her to save his life, but Noama didn’t know if she could. His belly had been opened by a red-hot shell fragment and promethium burned skin slithered over his chest like wet clay.
But that wasn’t what was going to kill him. That particular honour would go to the nicked coeliac artery in his abdomen.
‘He’s not gonna make it, Noama!’ shouted Kjell over the roar of the engines. ‘I need help over here, and this one might actually live.’
‘Shut up, lieutenant,’ snapped Noama, finally grasping the writhing artery. ‘I’m not losing this one. I can get it.’
The glistening blood vessel squirmed in her grip like a hostile snake. The Galenus rocked and her grip slackened for a fraction of a second.
‘Damn it, Anson!’ she shouted as the artery slid back into the soldier’s body. ‘Keep us level, you Throne-damned idiot! Don’t make me come up there!’
‘Trying, ma’am,’ said Anson over the vox, ‘but it’s kind of hard travelling at this speed and with all this traffic.’
Hundreds of vehicles were fleeing the carnage at Avadon, heading for the armed camp forming six hundred kilometres south around Lupercalia. Regiments from bases along the edges of the Tazkhar Steppes and the hinterlands of the east around the Preceptor Line were already congregating on Lupercalia, with more on the march every day.
All well and good. Assuming they made it that far.
Scuttlebutt from vox-fragments and the lips of wounded men said enemy Titans were pursuing them. Noama put little faith in such talk. More than likely the rumours were typical grunt pessimism.
At least she hoped so.
‘Are we going to make it, captain?’ asked Kjell.
‘Don’t ask me such stupid questions,’ she snapped. ‘I’m busy.’
‘The Sons of Horus are going to catch us, aren’t they?’
‘If they do I’ll be sure to let you know,’ said Noama.
She’d heard a man with no arms and legs claim the Titans of the three Legios were on the march to save them, but didn’t know whether that was a dying man’s fantasy or the truth. Knowing what she knew of the things men and women said in their most pain-filled moments, Noama inclined to the former.
‘Get back here, you slippery little bastard,’ said Noama, pressing her fingers into the soldier’s body. She grasped for the artery. ‘I can feel the little swine, but it’s making me work for it.’
Her fingers closed on the torn blood vessel, and hair-fine suture clamps extruded from her medicae gauntlet to seal it shut.
‘Got you,’ she said, pinning the artery in place with deft twists of her fingertips. Noama stood straight and, satisfied the worst of the boy’s life-threatening injuries was dealt with for now, brought over the implanted nursing servitor with a sub-vocal command.
‘Seal him up and wrap those burns in counterseptic gels,’ she said. ‘I’m not getting the bleeding stopped just for him to die from a damned infection, you understand? Right, now watch his blood pressure too, and let me know if he starts spiking. Clear?’
The servitor acknowledged her orders and set to work.
Noama moved onto the next hideously wounded soldier.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Been in the wars have we?’
The twin Warlords of Legio Fortidus strode from the gloomy caverns of the Zanark Deeps side by side followed by the last of their Legio. Princeps Uta-Dagon’s force numbered two Warlords and four Warhounds. On most battlefields that would be enough firepower to easily carry the day.
Against the force on Uta-Dagon’s threat auspex it would be spitting in the eye of the tempest.
When word had come of the civil war on Mars, Uta-Dagon had assumed his Titanicus brothers would be at the heart of the fighting, standing with those loyal to the Emperor. Only later, as more details emerged of the catastrophe engulfing the Red Planet had the truth emerged.
They were all that remained of Legio Fortidus.
In the end, though, it changed nothing.
Molech was at war, and the architect of his Legio’s doom was before him.
Uta-Dagon floated within his amniotic casket within the head section of Red Vengeance, the Warlord Titan he had piloted for eighty years and whose name he had changed after a vivid waking dream in the Manifold. His sister-princeps, Utu-Lerna had likewise been compelled to rename her engine, a Warlord whose new designation was Bloodgeld.
Uta-Dagon had long since sacrificed his organic eyes to the service of the Legio, but Red Vengeance’s auto-senses interpreted the sky a vivid crimson.
<A good sky to die beneath,> said Utu-Lerna, reading his thoughts through the Manifold as she so often did. Twins whose cords had been cut in the rains of Pax Olympus, their birth was seen as auspicious. And so it had proved when both were taken as babes by the Collegia Titanicus.
<Red Vengeance and a red sky.>
<For the Red Planet,> finished Utu-Lerna.
Burning starships streaked the sky. Had his brothers on Mars seen skies like this before they died? He hoped so, for it had been under such a sky the Legio had been born, fighting in the Dyzan Valley against the resurgent Terrawatt Clan.
<I see them, brother,> said Utu-Lerna. Bloodgeld’s warsight was keener than that of Red Vengeance and Uta-Dagon had learnt to trust his twin’s interpretations of her engine’s senses.
Moments later Uta-Dagon saw them too. Fifteen engines on the static-laced horizon, striding south in pursuit of the survivors of Avadon. A great column of armoured vehicles swarmed the Titan’s feet. Scavengers following apex predators.
In three minutes or less, the enemy Titans would be in range of the retreating Imperial forces. Thousands would die unless the pursuers could be given a more tempting target.
Uta-Dagon heard an intake of breath behind him and twisted his withered form around in the fluid-filled casket. Ur-Nammu had seen them too, her almost human face underlit by the soft glow of the threat auspex. Like Uta-Dagon, the Warmonger was Mechanicum. She was not engine-capable, yet had chosen to die with her brothers and sisters.
<You should not be afraid, Ur-Nammu,> said the princeps. <Today we will join our brothers in death.>
‘I do not fear death, my princeps,’ said Ur-Nammu, before correcting herself and presenting her answer in the Manifold. <I fear that I will be of no help to you in the coming fight.>