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

C S Friedman - Coldfire 2 - When True Night Falls

Prologue

I Can't Believe we're doing this.

Colony Commander Leonid Case lay full length upon the damp
Ernan soil, his hands clenched into fists before him. This whole
plan was insane, he thought. His furtive departure from the
settlement, his midnight stalk through these alien woods, and now
hiding in this gully like some forest-born predator, alert for the
scent of prey... in fact, the only thing crazier than the way he was
acting was the situation that had brought him here in the first place.
And the man responsible for it.

Damn Ian! Damn his delusions! Didn't the settlement have enough
problems here without his adding to them? Wasn't it enough that
people were dying here - dying! - in ways that defied all human
science? Did Ian have to add to that nightmare?

The blackness of despair churned coldly in Case's gut, and panic
stirred in its wake. He couldn't let it get to him. He was responsible
for this fledgling colony, which meant that the others depended on
him - on his advice, his judgment, and most of all on his personal
stability. He 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