"C. S. Friedman - Coldfire 2 - When True Night Falls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friedman C. S)

couldn't afford to let despair overwhelm him, any more
than he could allow himself to openly vent his fury over his
chief botanist's behavior. But sometimes it seemed almost
more than he could handle. God knows he had signed on
for better and for worse, well aware of all the tragedies that
might befall a newborn colony . . . but no one had prepared
him for this.

Thirty-six dead now. Thirty-six of his people. And not
just dead: gruesomely dead, fearsomely dead, dead in ways
that defied human acceptance. He remembered the feel of
Sally Chang's frozen flesh in his hands, so brittle that when
he tried to lift her body it shattered into jagged bits, like
glass. And Wayne Reinhart's corpse, which was little more
than a jellylike package of skin and blood and pulped
organs by the time they found it. And Faren Whitehawk . . .
that was the most frightening one of all, he thought. Not
because it was the most repellent; Faren's corpse was
whole, the flesh still pliant, the expression almost peaceful.
But all the blood was gone from the body, impossibly
drawn out through two puncture wounds in the neck. Or so
the settlement's doctors had informed him. Christ in
heaven! Looking down at those marks - ragged and
reddened, crusted black about the edges with dried blood
and worse - he knew that what they were facing here was
nothing Earth could have prepared them for. Monsters
drawn from Earth's tradition, their own human nightmares
garbed in solid flesh and pitted against them . . . how did
you fight such a thing? Where did you even start? When
Carrie Sands was killed three nights later by some winged
creature that had accosted her while she slept, he wasn't
surprised to hear her bunkmate describe it as a creature
straight out of East Indian mythology. Something that fed
on nightmares, he recalled. Only this time it got carried
away, and fed on flesh as well.

Jesus Christ. Where was it going to end?

Thirty-six dead. That was out of the three thousand and
some odd colonists who had survived the coldsleep journey
to this place, to stand under the light of an alien sun and
commit themselves body and soul to building a new world.
His world. Now they were all at risk. And dammit, the
seedship should have foreseen this! It was supposed to
survey each planet in question until there was no doubt,
absolutely no doubt, that the colonists would thrive there. If
not, it was programmed to move on to the next available
system. In theory it was a foolproof procedure, designed to
protect Earth's explorers from the thousand and one
predictable hazards of extraterrestrial colonization. Like