"Gabriel Mesta - StarCraft 02 - Shadow of the Xel'Naga" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mesta Gabriel)

migraines and a dire sense of unreasonable foreboding. Her mother had sent the teenage girl to bed early,
where Octavia had had terrible nightmares.

The next morning she had awakened in a too-quiet house to find both of her parents dead in their bed.
Beneath wet sheets twisted about by their final agony, the bodies of her mother and father were a
quivering, oozing mass of erupted fungal bodies, rounded mushrooms of exploding spores that rapidly
disintegrated all flesh. . . .

Lars and Octavia had never returned to that house, burning it to the ground along with the tainted fields
and the homes of seventeen other families that had been infected by the horrible, parasitic disease.

Though a terrible blow to the colony, the spore blight had drawn the survivors together even more
tightly. The new mayor, Jacob тАЬNikтАЭ Nikolai, had delivered an impassioned eulogy for all the victims of
the spore plague, somehow rekindling the fires of independence in the process and giving the settlers the
drive to stay here. They had already lived through so much, survived so many hardships, that they could
pull through this.

Moving together into an empty prefab dwelling at the edge of Free Haven, Octavia and Lars had rebuilt
their lives. They made plans. They expanded. They tracked their automated mines and watched the
seismic monitors for signs of tectonic disturbances that might affect their work or the town. The two
drove out to the fields each day and labored side by side until well after dark. They worked harder,
risked more . . . and survived.

As Octavia and Lars passed through the open gate and drove around the town square toward their
residence, the storm finally struck with full force. It became a slanting wall of rain and hail as the
roboharvester ground its way past the lights and barricaded doors of metal-walled huts. Their own home
looked the same as all the others, but Lars found it by instinct, even in the blinding downpour.

He spun the large vehicle to a halt in the flat gravel clearing in front of their house. He locked down the
treads and powered off the engine, while Octavia tugged a reinforced hat down over her head and got
ready to jump out of the cab and make a break for the door. Even running ten feet in this storm would be
a miserable ordeal.

Before the robo-harvester's systems dimmed completely, Octavia checked the fuel reservoirs, since her
brother never remembered to do so. тАЬWe'll need to get more Vespene gas from the refinery.тАЭ

Lars grabbed the door handle and hunched his head down. тАЬTomorrow, tomorrow. Rastin's probably
hiding inside his hut cursing the wind right now. That old codger doesn't like storms any more than I do.тАЭ

He popped open the hatch and jumped out seconds before a strong gust slammed the door back into its
frame. Octavia exited from the other side, hopping from the step to the broad tractor treads to the
ground.

As she ran beside her brother in a mad dash to their dwelling, the hail hit them like machine-gun bullets.
Lars got their front door open, and the siblings crashed into the house, drenched and windblown. But at
least they were safe from the storm.

Sonic thunder pealed across the sky again. Lars undid the fastenings on his jacket. Octavia yanked off
her dripping hat and tossed it into a corner, then powered up their lights so she could check one of the
old seismographs they had installed in their hut.