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.
If they could be brought to bear.
<Ready the hellstorm,> she ordered. <Magos Surann? How long until the annihilator is ready?>
‘Information – five seconds,’ answered Magos Surann from the raised gallery behind her, where plugged Mechanicum adepts sat in rows like a binary choir.
<Perfect,> said Kalonice, bunching a fist at her side as readiness icons flashed up from the multiple weapon systems atop the battlements at the Titan’s shoulders. Her Thallax body was limber and agile, but the sensory weight of the Imperator was immense. At times like this, she could accept there were some benefits to being held weightless within amniotic gels.
She felt stabbing prickles all across her body. Her void shields were taking hits, scrappy and uncoordinated, but hits nonetheless. The infantry she’d stepped over had heavy weapons. Nothing individually capable of harming her or taking out a void shield, but irritating nonetheless.
The Shadowswords were firing, the bright spears of their volcano cannons bursting shields and overloading the pylons.
‘The voids are taking hits,’ said Ashur, as though she wouldn’t already know that.
<I said no distractions,> said Kalonice, issuing an engagement order to every weapon section. <Open fire.>
Kalonice let each of her weapons systems have its head, allowing the moderati and techs to wreak their own devastation. They all deserved a measure of the spoils of vengeance. The recoil from so many vast weapon systems was dampened by multiple suspensor webs and pneumatic compensators, but still shook the command bridge with the force of so many discharges.
Enemy icons vanished from the Manifold, dozens at a time.
But she kept the plasma annihilator for herself, zeroing in on a towering engine of bronze and brass worked with skulls and lurching towards her on spiked wheels. A corrupted engine of the Mechanicum, a hateful reminder of treachery within her own order.
Kalonice drew power from the boiling reactor core at her heart. The heat was immense, and she drew and drew from the well of plasma fire until the screaming agony in her right fist was almost too much to bear.
<You’re mine,> she said, but even as the algorithmic resonator formed the words, Kalonice felt an icy cold knife slide into her lower back. Illusory, but no less painful for that.
The pain broke her hold on the plasma fury encased in her fist and the arm vanished in a furious supernova of white fire that rocked the Imperator back on its heels. Kalonice screamed, the resonators having no problem rendering the depths of her agony.
Her Thallax body fell to the deck, bio-feedback bathing her machine-wrapped spinal column in pain signals. The pain was overwhelming, all-consuming. Kalonice fought to shut herself off to the sensations, but Paragon of Terra’s pain was hers now. The reactor at her heart convulsed. Armour plating buckled, atomic bleed-off vented explosively from cycling louvres on the Titan’s rear quarters.
Alarms blared. Binaric horns screamed their agonies into the command bridge. Damage controls blew out in overload and the red light of anger became a blood light of horrifying pain. Kalonice struggled to hold on, to not let the loss of her arm break her grip on the Manifold. She heard the machine-spirit of the Titan howling, an animal vocalisation of impossible pain.
‘Etana!’ cried a voice. A flesh voice. One she knew.
<Carthal?> she gasped.
‘It’s me,’ he said, hauling her to her feet. She looked down at her right arm, expecting to see it as a mangled, molten mess. But, of course, it was undamaged. Paragon of Terra had borne the hurt, but she had felt it. Oh, how she had felt it!
<What happened?>
‘They hit us,’ said Ashur. ‘The bastards hit us hard.’
<How?> she said, gradually inloading jagged shards of data. <We still have voids in place.>
‘It came from inside the voids,’ said Ashur, flinching as the Imperator rocked with the force of impacts.
Kalonice felt the impacts. Searing, stabbing blades plunging into her machine body.
‘It’s House Devine!’ said Ashur.
<House Devine? Clarify.>
‘The bastards have betrayed us,’ hissed Ashur.
The dragon was screaming. It bled smoke and light from its wounds, and the Stormlord closed for the kill. He rammed his lance into the beast’s flanks, hearing the splinter of bones and the hiss of slicing flesh. His other arm was a crackling whip, useless against such a towering beast, but lethal to the tiny, scurrying things that spilled from its legs.
He circled around again, bringing his lance to bear as a storm of spines blasted from the beast’s carapace. A knight fell, pierced through by one such barb and he came apart in an explosion of blood and horsemeat.
The towering beast staggered. Their sudden attack had caught it off guard and almost brought it to its knees. But he had not thought to humble it with one strike. Already it was reacting to them, but the Stormlord had not earned himself that name without good reason.
He wheeled around the crashing footfall of the beast. The thunderous impact shook the ground for kilometres in all directions. His horse reared in panic, but he quelled it with the force of his will.
His knights circled back and forth, closing in time and again to deliver thrusts of their lances and stabbing cuts from their reapers. They were hurting it, but it was too big to be brought down by such wounds.
He looked up and saw the beast’s wounded heart, a pulsing shimmer of light where the source of its power lay. Thick scales of draconic armour protected its heart from a frontal attack, but from behind...
From behind it was vulnerable. Even more so now. The Stormlord’s first thrust had hurt the beast and exposed its greatest weakness.
‘Warriors of Molech!’ shouted the Stormlord. ‘No one lance can pierce this beast’s armour. We must be as one in our ardour, as one in our thrust into its heart.’
A breath of fire incinerated another of his vajras. If the killing blow was not struck soon, the beast would overwhelm them. It was already turning its wounded heart away.
‘Your lances!’ screamed the Stormlord. ‘Unite them with mine!’
His knights formed up around him as they rode with all possible speed to chase the dragon’s wounded heart. It bled light and steam, the exhalations of a monster the world needed slain.
The Stormlord laughed as he felt the strength of his knights fill him. Their lance arms were now his. What he stabbed, they stabbed. What he killed, they would kill.
The leavings of the beast still streamed from its gigantic legs. Ants and bacterium shed from a desperate creature that knew its ending was at hand, but still clung to life. Hundreds of them, thousands perhaps. The vajras fought and killed them with their battle blades alone, for their lance arms were now his to command.
His armour shuddered with impacts, his shield arm was just as strong as his lance arm. He felt the heat of the conjoined lances in his fingers, the potency of a weapon on the brink of release.
The dragon knew what he was doing.
It knew he had the power to kill it.
He was too fast for it, the fleetness of his steed more than a match for its cumbersome power. No matter how fast it tried to turn, he would be quicker. It spat a breath of fire to the ground, incinerating a host of its own defenders in its desperation. The Stormlord felt one of his vajras die, and cried out as he felt the righteous fury of the knight fill him.