"Clayton Emery - Blood Sacrifice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

Blood Sacrifice
by Clayton Emery
Men screamed and scattered as a giant scorpion rushed from the mist.

A blood-red blur long as a shuttle craft, it was studded with spikes and a forked tail that
dripped poison. Half the men in its path were manacled, so keeled over in the narrow
corridor. Seven were shredded by razor claws. Soldiers in green dived and dodged, many
floating off the twisted floor. Only the guards in red-lacquered armor ducked their heads and
stood their ground and hammered massed-plasma charges at the joints in the scorpion's
carapace. A dozen charges exploding inside the shell pulped its guts, so the monster
teetered and laid down, graceful as a banking butterfly. Under it twitched a dozen corpses.
"Christ, why couldn't it wait until AFTER?" Bullock thumbed back his green helmet and
wiped his brow, then bounced his prisoner off the canted floor.

Jessup wore orange prison coveralls and chains, and shuffled along barefoot. He snuffed
blood from his nose. Bullock had hurled him to the stone floor and knelt on him during the
attack. Not for love. Jessup snarled, "Thanks. It'd be a shame to lose your sheep when
you've dragged me this far."
"Belt up." Bullock batted the prisoner's head. "Talk like that got you here, sheepdip."

"YOUR talk got me here! YOU turned me in!"

"You don't know that. Pick up your feet."
Infantrymen hustled their prisoners back into line, neatly paired one to one. A red guard fired
bolts into the huge leaking carcass, cutting it into halves. The elite hated scorpions, the only
enemies that could penetrate their red armor. The dead beast was dragged aside. Called a
scorpion, sometimes a lobster, the alien was big as a truck, shaggy with quills, armed with
claws and a double-stinger venomous tail. Mangled prisoners were sorted into dead or
dying, and green-clad infantrymen who'd lost partners cursed and turned back for the
troopship moored at the surface. Red guards ranged into dark pockets, peering through
goggles at the warm, hazy air that reeked of rancid oranges, though no one had ever found
any fruit.
The planetoid was riddled with wormhole corridors and odd-shaped rooms jutting at odd
angles, most rooms empty but some crammed with exotic machinery and baffled
technicians. In spots black shafts tilted towards the planet's hot core, down deep where
scorpions skittered. One ovoid cavern even sported stone tiers like an arena and twisted
exits. But the long line of green and orange men trudged steadily towards the tall room
ahead as if feeding a giant's maw.
As the line crawled, Jessup's talked to quell his suffocating fear. "So you finally get your
armor."
"Yep." Bullock looked off at nothing, but never lose sight of Jessup.

"Get to join the Red Brigade, SERGEANT."
"That's right, ex-sergeant."

"Because you turned me in!"
"Because I EARNED it."

Jessup tried to spit and failed. "You earned nothing, no more than Earth. This rock was a gift
from the gods! Alien relics covered with dust, no one knows how they work, and Earth too