Fire Warrior by Warhammer

Author:Warhammer [Warhammer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_action
ISBN: 1-84416-010-6
Publisher: Games Workshop Ltd.
Published: 2003-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Kais hurried across arterial bridges.

They sprouted chaotically from high tiered walls, plush tapestries and red velvet walkways branching and intersecting tapering cords of steel and rock. They arched out across abyssal spaces, smoke-fogged and bat-haunted. This high within the vessel’s infrastructure, bulbous viewing galleries and veinlike corridors opened up onto glass-fronted panoramas of the void beyond. The distant flickering of lights and tumbling shadows announced majestically that the fleet battle continued to rage. Every now and then a shuddering, grinding roar — like steel skies being torn open by celestial blades — heralded another tau-fired salvo of munitions gouging into the crippled vessel’s flanks. He lowered his vision and limped onwards, hoping the blood trail was dwindling.

The explosion that had ripped the engines from the gue’la vessel had shaken him. He thought he’d given himself enough time to get clear, setting the charges for five raik’ors then scampering, rat-like, along hallways and gantries; scuttling up ladders and diving into lifts. He’d broadcast several all-frequency alerts to the other shas’las aboard, urging them to get clear of the engine decks as soon as possible. There were no replies.

When it came, the detonation had been like the laughter of a thunder god, consuming every other noise and blasting great waves of destruction along the vessel. Kais had lurched headlong to the ground, momentarily astounded by the force of his handiwork. The deck split open beneath him and he scrabbled, crying out, for sturdier ground. Chain reactions rumbled for long raik’ans, shaking loose bolts from the ceiling and killing the lights in a surge of crimson standbys. Ripples of deflected force surged through the bulkheads, eliciting a great grinding, gnashing sound that hurt his ears and left him shaking his head in confusion.

And then it was all quiet.

All quiet, for the first time since he came aboard this ugly mausoleum ship. No more distant semiconscious reportage of the sonorous engines, rumbling throatily He’d wondered, skulking in the devastation, how many people, how many hundreds — maybe thousands — had perished. He could see them in his mind, pale lips gaping fishlike, as their lungs collapsed and their blood turned solid, tumbling out into the vastness of space.

He thought back to the decompressing chamber in the promenade aboard the Or’es Tash’var. All those tau and gue’la slipping into nothingness in a rush of blasted air and silent screams. He’d been horrified at the raw power of the vacuum, a destructive force above and beyond his tiny, mortal rages and flaws. It had humbled him.

And what now, now that he’d shredded a city-in-space and vented its chittering, maggotlike occupants into that same vacuum? Shouldn’t he feel godlike? Shouldn’t that single act of genocide obliterate whatever bitterness he might have in his soul, eclipsing utterly the numbness, outshining the relentless glare of his father’s eyes? Shouldn’t it be significant?

No. He didn’t feel a thing.

Dazed, appalled at his own detachment, he’d stumbled upwards through the ship’s layers until he could go no further and there, seeing all

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