Faith Club

13.9.11 17:42
Izlasīju, tātad, Adeptus Arbites (Shira Calpurnia sērija) gabalu Legacy, patika, lasīšu vēl. Stāsts par Rogue Trader floti ar paša Imperatora pirms 10'000 gadiem parakstīto čarteru, Navis Nobilite navigatoru sazvērestība pret Adeptus Mechanicus sazvērestību, pret Ecclesiarchy sazvērestību, un pa vidu Arbites.

Pievienoju fragmentu par warp monstra parādīšanos uz kosmosa kuģa:

***

Death found itself born inside the Gann-Luctis, inside the re-established Geller field that cut it off from the beautiful warm fluidity of the immaterium outside. It had found itself born through no conscious effort of its own: in the moment the field had flickered, its essence earthed itself quickly and painlessly into a mind inside like a spark jumping across a circuit-gap and then it was in a dry, cold, glaring straightjacket of a universe, surrounded by minds imprisoned in meat that jabbered and flapped.

It didn’t like the way the meat behaved, so it did certain things that its instincts suggested and the meat took on new shapes and patterned itself through this horribly constricting cell of dimensions differently and then there was no more behaviour. It did not like the way that there were ways in which it could not move, but it found it could do things to change the little physical universe it found itself in. It could unravel things and part things, and it found that rending and breaking was far more delicious here than manipulating the soft stuff of the warp. And so it went looking for more meat to break, meat whose little droplets of spirit would
puff so exhilaratingly into nothing when it pushed on them.

[...]

Death came behind them, framed in the archway where the assembly area split like the arms of a Y into two low corridors. It capered and flopped on the red-slicked deck, pausing with each little leap or stamping step as though the sensations of its lacerated feet slapping against the metal were odd and delicious. It had been unfamiliar with the limitations of the meat it had somehow
become snagged in at first, and by the time it had learned that the pitiful little extremities the meat owned were supposed to move only in certain ways most of its joints had been broken or dislocated by the inhuman will moving its muscles. There was a point when if had wanted to pass through a hole it had managed to make in a bulkhead that the meat had to run around, but the hole had been barely wide enough for one extremity to fit through, so it had crumpled the hard little bone frame the meat was strung up on and fed itself through the hole like a snake. The frame had not reassembled on the other side, and trying to hold it in place through will was tiring. Now its skeleton was a mass of bone fragments and splinters all clicking and grating as it moved. Its feet either splatted on the metal with the sound of raw meat or clicked like a dog’s foot from the bone jutting through the sole.

The midshipman’s uniform it had worn when it had still had the human mind it had been born with was soaked red and dripping, but not all of the blood was its own. With a crackle of tearing flesh it shot out an arm, the skin popping as the limb distended, and a hand that looked like a cudgel spiked with bone thudded into the back of one of the rearmost crew. Only Cherrick, standing his ground at the head of the formation and clubbing crew aside as they ran at him, actually saw the red shape drag its catch back.

Suddenly more bone splinters sprouted through its skin: first just their points like droplets of hard white sweat and then their whole length like bloodied cactus-spines, and it took the screaming crewman into its embrace. He screamed for a moment longer, then the red thing let him drop and gave out a gargling wail that could have been triumph, disappointment or something else
beyond human thought.