"S. M. Stirling - Draka 05 - Drakas!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

sound in the back of his throat and collapsed amid the white fragments.

Custer watched, unmoving and without any great interest, as the two men kicked and flopped and
writhed and then lay still. On the far side of the fire he could see the dead Bushman's eyes, still open,
staring at him. The small round face seemed to be smiling.

***

Now, as the sun breaks clear of the eastern horizon, Custer looks at the bodies and then up at the
circling vultures. He wonders how much longer they will wait. Not much longer, he guesses, and puts his
hand over the gun in his lap, which is still warm from firing at the hyenas all night. He is almost out of
ammunition. Perhaps he should take Pace's gunbelt, or Garvin's rifle.

He gets to his feet, very slowly, his movements those of a very old man, or perhaps a sleepwalker. He
stands for a moment gazing about him, at the empty grass-covered plain and the enormous sky.

"Oh, Libbie," he whispers, hearing now the tiny sound behind him, turning, feeling an almost gentle
thumping sensation halfway down his right thigh; looking down, now, entirely without surprise, at the
ridiculous little arrow sticking barely an inch into his leg. "LibbieтАФ"
 Hewn in Pieces For the Lord
John J. Miller
John Miller resides in the arid lands of the southwest, an environment not totally different from the
Sudanese deserts of this story. He has written for graphic novels, and some highly inventive stories for the
greatWild Cards alternate history series.

Herein he tells a tale of the great Christian hero Charles "Chinese" Gordon, an unwitting accomplice of
the Draka in a much darker Africa . . .

"It's not the heat, so much," William Hicks said as he took a sip of chilled wine from a
delicately-stemmed crystal goblet, "it's the humidity. Bally muggy for a desert."

Hicks had retired as a colonel in the British Army six months earlier, but finding the prospect of living on
half-pay unpalatable, had joined the Draka, who were desperate for experienced command officers.
Within the last decade and a half the Domination had added vast African territories, but their control over
some of these new lands was nominal at best. Hicks, who had never even stepped on African soil before
joining the Draka, had immediately been given the rank of strategos, handed a legion of Janissaries, and
ordered to pacify the territory once known as the Sudan.

Merarch Kevin Harrison, his chief of staff, mopped his brow and dropped the sodden handkerchief on
the camp table. Harrison was an ex-soldier of the Confederacy who'd been a Draka for a decade. He'd
spent most of those years in the Sudan and in fact had been a tetrach in the expeditionary force that had
brought this hellish country into the Domination. His job now was to provide the newly appointed
strategos with the benefit of his local experience.

The officers were sitting in the shade cast by the canvas awning of the command tent, taking afternoon
tea as their legion settled into the day's encampment. They were somewhere in the northern Sudanese
desert, chasing an army of rebellious natives who had so far proved remarkably elusive.

"Humid, yes sir." Harrison preferred tea to wine, and beer to tea, but when in field camp you do as the
strategos does, even if the strategos knew less about deserts than a bloody penguin.