"David Drake - General 03 - The Anvil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

but someone meeting them together for the first time would have thought
Raj a decade older.
"How long?" Thom said. He was half-afraid of the answer.
"Another year and a half."
Thom's surprise was visible. He's aged that much in so little time? he
thought. His friend was a tall man, 190 centimeters, broad-shouldered
and narrow-hipped, with a swordsman's thick wrists. There were a few
silver hairs in the bowl-cut black curls now, and his gray eyes held no
youth at all.
"Well, I've seen the titanosauroid, since," Raj went on.
"Governor Barholm did send you to the Southern Territories?"
Raj nodded; they'd discussed that on the first visit. After Raj's
victories against the Colony in the east, he was the natural choice.
"A hard campaign, from the way you look."
"No," Raj said, moistening his lips. "A little nerve-racking sometimes,
but I wouldn't call it hard, exactly."
observe, the computer said. The walls around them shivered. The perfect
reflection dissolved in smoke, which scudded away --

***
-- and returned as a ragged white pall spurting from the muzzles of
volleying rifles. From behind a courtyard wall, Raj Whitehall and
troopers wearing the red and orange neckscarves of the 5th Descott shot
down an alleyway toward the docks of Port Murchison. Each pair of hands
worked rhythmically on the lever, ting, and the spent brass shot
backward, click, as they thumbed a new round into the breech and
brought the lever back up, crack as they fired.
There were already windrows of bodies on the pavement: Squadron
warriors killed before they knew they were at risk. Survivors crouched
behind the corpses of their fellows and fired back desperately. Their
clumsy flintlocks were slow to load, inaccurate even at this range;
they had to expose themselves to reload, fumbling with powder horns and
ramrods, falling back dead more often than not as the Descotter
marksmen fired. A few threw the firearms aside with screams of
frustrated rage, charging with their long single-edged swords whirling.
By some freak one got as far as the wall, and a bayonet punched through
his belly. The man fell backward off the steel, his mouth and eyes
perfect O's of surprise.
A ball ricocheted from one of the pillars and grazed Raj's buttock
before slapping into the small of the back of the officer beside him in
the firing line. The stricken man dropped his revolver and pawed
blindly at his wound, legs giving their final twitch. Raj shot
carefully, standing in the regulation pistol-range position with one
hand behind the back and letting the muzzle fell back before putting
another round through the center of mass.
"Marcy!" the barbarians called in their Namerique dialect. Mercy! They
threw down their weapons and began raising their hands. "Marcy, migo!"
Mercy, friend!

***