"Robert Thurston - Falcon Guard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thurston Robert)

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To the memory of my parents

Prologue

Star Captain Joanna, in her darkest fantasies, saw herself dying with a
projectile ripping through her body, or incinerated in a BattleMech, or
destroyed by a lucky shot from an enemy MechWarrior's weapon. In her wilder
nightmares, she imagined being murdered in her bed by a vile freebirth, or
mauled by a bloodthirsty creature on some planet where she was stranded, or
perhaps ejecting successfully from the cockpit of her 'Mech only to drown in a
deep lake before she could free herself from the restraints of her ejection
seat. Once she had dreamed that the best death would come in heroic combat or
even during a Trial of Bloodright, where she would meet her end in a ferocious
final round of the competition for a Blood-name.

But now her dreams had faded, for she had become an old warrior. She still
piloted a 'Mech as a warrior of Clan Jade Falcon, but no longer would any
Bloodnamed warrior sponsor her for a slot in any Trial of Bloodright. Without
a nomination, Joanna's only hope for eligibility was to take part in a Grand
Melee, but to that she would never stoop. (Joanna knew of only one warrior who
had eventually won his Bloodname via that route, and the man was high on the
long list of people she despised.) Her best hope now was cremation after death
so that her ashes would return to the same sibko system that had spawned her
existence, to be blended with the amniotic fluid of the artificial wombs.
Without a Bloodname, Star Captain Joanna could never achieve the ultimate goal
of all Clan warriors, the inclusion of her genes in the sacred

8 Robert Thurston

gene pool. Letting that dream die had been the most difficult of all, even
after Joanna realized she would never win a Bloodname. Since then she had
added an even more dread possibility to her fantasies about death, this one of
surviving to the time when she would die in her bed either from disease or
sheer old age. Of all the ends she could imagine, that was the most appalling.

Despite all the conjectures, Joanna had never foreseen being buried alive