"David Weber - Empire of Man 02 - March to the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

forested, and by slowing down they'd been able to let the flar-ta forage. But that only worked if the
point kept the pace down.
"Gotcha, Sergeant Major," Liszez replied over his helmet com, and slowed down, pausing for a
moment to look around.
The path they were following was wide for a game trail, and well beaten. The vegetation was open
on either side, and the lower limbs of the coniferlike evergreens had been stripped off by some forager,
which permitted good sight distance . . . unlike the damn jungle.
He'd stopped at the edge of an open area. It looked like whatever had been eating on the trees had
used the clearing for rooting, because the ground was torn up and turned over in every direction. It was
also fairly smooth, however, and the path continued on the other side.
The morning was clear and cool, with the dew just coming off the bushes. This area was a blessed
relief for the company, but they still wanted to keep moving. Not only did they look forward to a respite
in the city, but the faster they went, the sooner they would reach the coast.
The coast was, of course, only an intermediate stop, but it had begun to loom large in the minds of
the company. The coast was an end in itself now, and on maps it looked like they were nearly there.
They weren't. At best, it was weeks away through the jungles on this side of the mountains, but at least it
was getting closer and closer. And that was a damned good thing, Liszez told himself, because good as
their nanites were at extracting usable nutrition from the most unlikely sources, there were limits in all
things. The severe losses the company had taken at Voitan and Marshad "helped" a good bit, in a
gruesomely ironic sort of way, because each dead Marine had been one less charge on the priceless
cache of vitamin and protein supplements packed on the animals and on their own backs. Fewer mouths
meant they could stretch their stores further, but once the stores were gone, they were gone . . . and the
shipwrecked humans were dead. So the sooner they could get their butts aboard a ship and set sail, the
better.
Liszez looked over his shoulder and decided the column had closed up enough. He reminded himself
to keep the pace down, checked his surroundings for threats, and moved out. On his third step, the
ground erupted.
***
Roger looked at the trees. The stripped bark reminded him of something, and he glanced at his asi.
"Cord, these trees . . ."
"Yes. Flar-ke. We need to be careful," the shaman said.
Pahner had finally convinced the prince that the lead packbeast was not a place for the commander
to be, but Roger still insisted on driving Patty and covering the column with his big eleven-millimeter
magnum hunting rifle. So far in the mountains the only hazards had been inanimate, but Marduk had
taught them not to let their guards down, and the prince keyed his radio on the reserve command
frequency.
"Captain, Cord says that this area is flar-ke territory. Like where we first met him."
Pahner didn't reply for a moment, and Roger remembered the Marine's incandescent rage on that
long ago day. The prince never had explained to the captain that the company's free-flow com net had
been so unfamiliarтАФand confusingтАФto him at the time that he genuinely hadn't heard the Marine's order
not to fire at the flar-ke which had been pursuing Cord. It had been Roger's very first personal
experience with a full-fledged tongue lashing, and Pahner's fury had been so intense that the prince had
decided that anything which sounded like an excuse would have been considerably worse than useless.
At the same time, even if he had heard the order, he would have taken the shot anyway. He knew
that. And he hadn't taken it to save Cord, eitherтАФno one had even known the shaman was there to be
saved. No. He'd fired because he'd hunted more types of dangerous wild game than most people in the
galaxy even realized existed, and he'd recognized the territorial strop markings on the trees in the area.
Markings very like those which surrounded them now . . .
 "I see," the captain said finally, and Roger knew the same memories had been passing through the
older man's mind. They'd never discussed the episode again, and Roger sometimes wondered how much