"David Drake - General 01 - The Forge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

The General, Vol. I: The Forge



by S.M. Stirling and David Drake (1991)


A Baen Books Original

Second printing, March 1995
 [blurb]




"We made it!"

They were still two hundred meters ahead of the first Colonists. Carbines cracked and spat, but
you would have to be dead lucky to hit a moving target from a galloping dog. Of course, once the
platoon were bunched on the slow-moving ferry, nothing would prevent the better than three hundred
pursuers from deploying and shooting their quarry to ribbons long before they moved out of range.

Not to mention the pompom that was bouncing along behind the Colonial cavalry. The
quarter-kilo shells would be more than enough to deal with the ferry even without the carbines of the
riders.
The buildings were blurring by, adobe and pole frames. "Rifles out and take what cover you can
as soon as we get on board," Foley was shouting. Try and take out the pompom crew! The ferry bulked
larger and larger, but the four-meter gap of the loading ramp was an absurdly small target for thirty-odd
men galloping on dogback.

Raj grinned to himself as he thought of galloping toward it without pursuit. It would be terrifying.
Collisions, dogs falling, men being trampled or thrown against wood and machinery with bone-snapping
force. It was wonderful, how circumstances redefined the term "danger."
 Chapter one

The rat screamed.

Raj Whitehall spun on one heel, the beam of his carbide lamp stabbing out scarcely faster than
the pistol in his right hand.

"Shit," he muttered, as the light fell on the corner of the underground chamber. The rodent was
dead now, dangling from the jaws of a cat-sized spersauroid, a slinky thing with a huge head and slender
body carried high on four spidery legs. It blinked at them with eyelids that closed to a vertical slit, and
then was gone with a rustle of scales against rubble. Raj grimaced. One of the few pleasant things about
living in East Residence was that Terran life had mostly replaced the local. But not in the catacombs, it
seemed.

Thom Poplanich laughed. "Careful, Raj," he said. "Those bullets will bounce, you know."

Raj grinned back a trifle sheepishly as he holstered the weapon. A genuine five-shot revolver, it