"Christopher Rowley - The Battlemaster" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowley Christopher)

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OUTMATCHED

With shocking suddenness, a bizarre creature dropped upon them from the ceiling. It was dark gray
with pink streaks, and a beard of green polyps matted its chest region. It had two humanlike legs and a
number of long, narrow tentacles.

The thing struck with the hardened tips of tentacles that stabbed flesh as effectively as spears. Men
were eviscerated, beheaded, amputated of one or more limbs in a frenzied but brief struggle.

Then Janodo of the Gate hit it with a shotgun blast, in the chest, where green polyps were thick. Blood
and fragments spattered the floor.

The men stepped back, expecting the thing to fall dead. With another loud hiss, it seized Janodo and
bounded out of the cowshed.
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CHAPTER ONE

THE UNIVERSE IS A THING OF LACY TEXTURES, SUDDEN EXPLOSIONS, cold vastness,
frozen foams. On these insubstantial threads and tatters lost in the boundless void, primitive life survives
by accident, a thing of the merest margins.

Through the slow tick of time, species have come and gone, their viability tested by climatic change, by
asteroid impact, by evolutionary wedging.

The merest handful of species has ever risen beyond their evolutionary envelopes, the limited horizons
of their home-worlds.

Of these, a tiny fraction have reached the stars.

In the midst of the fifty-fifth century of spaceflight, the third millennium of the ITAA Era, the human
species, originating in the Sol system, was the dominant intelligence within the local galactic arm.

This position bad been achieved, however, only through the lucky discovery of the Starhammer
weapon. Without this technology bequeathed from an ancient war, the human species would never have
broken free from the domination of the laowon, the other Orion-arm bipedal spacegoing species of this
era.
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