Читать онлайн «Red Fury»
Автор Джеймс Сваллоу
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day. so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican. the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes. the Space Marines, bioengineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants—and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
CHAPTER ONE
Some things do not die all at once.
Men. Daemons. Whole worlds. Sometimes, the fight bleeds them white and still they will not perish, moving as if they are alive, going through the motions of it, unaware that they are already ended. Such things are corpses, after a fashion, ashen and pallid, heavy with the musk of decay.
Eritaen was such a thing. An urbanised sprawl-planet, too far off the axis of the Imperium’s prime trade routes to be thought of as a hive-world, it had at one time thrived in its own, limited manner. But the rebellion had made all of that go away.
The people had been weak; it was a lament repeated across the galaxy. They had been weak and allowed the taint into their society. And this was the reward they reaped, to die slowly in the ruins of the cities that had birthed them, dying but already dead.
Rafen dallied beneath the arching hood of an ornate atrium, the entrance to a public kinema. Shattered glass lay in drifts around the ticket vendor kiosk and the flame-blackened stanchions. Broken displays advertising pict-dramas and out-of-date newsreels glittered in the dimness. Like everything he had seen in the city, the debris had a fine layer of powdery, dun-coloured dust across it. The sandy fines were everywhere, billowing through the streets, hanging in great cloudy knots in the sky making the blue daylight muddy and bland. The dust left an unpleasant taste at the back of his throat, like bonemeal.
