"David Weber - Empire of Man 04 - We Few" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

It was, in fact, as virtually all of them realized, an impossible mission, but the "Bronze Barbarians"
were not simply Imperial Marines. They were the Empress' Own, and impossible or not, they did it.
For eight endless months, they fought their way across half a world of vicious carnivores, sweltering
jungle, swamp, mountains, seas, and murderous barbarian armies. When their advanced weapons failed
in the face of Marduk's voracious climate and ecology, they improvised new onesтАФswords, javelins,
black powder rifles, and muzzle-loading artillery. They learned to build ships. They destroyed the most
terrible nomadic army Marduk had ever seen, and then did the same thing to the cannibalistic empire of
the Krath. At first, the horned, four-armed, cold-blooded, mucus-covered, three-meter-tall natives of
Marduk seriously underestimated the small, bipedal visitors to their planet. Physically, humans closely
resembled over-sized basiks, small, stupid, rabbit-like creatures routinely hunted by small children armed
only with sticks. Those Mardukans unfortunate enough to get in the Empress' Own's way, however, soon
discovered that these basiks were far more deadly than any predator their own world had ever
produced.
And along the way, the "Playboy Prince" discovered that he was, indeed, the heir of Miranda
MacClintock, the first Empress of Man. At the beginning of that epic march across the face of Marduk,
the one hundred and ninety Marines of Bravo Company felt nothing but contempt for the worthless
princeling whose protection was their responsibility; by its end, Bravo Company's twelve survivors would
have fixed bayonets to charge Hell itself at his back. And the same was true of the Mardukans recruited
into his service as The Basik's Own.
But having, against all odds, captured the spaceport and a Saint special operations ship which called
upon it, the surviving Bronze Barbarians and The Basik's Own faced a more daunting challenge still, for
they discovered that the coup launched by Jackson Adoula, Prince of Kellerman, had obviously
succeeded. Unfortunately, no one else seemed to realize Empress Alexandra was being controlled by the
same people who had murdered her children and her grandchildren. And, still worse, was the discovery
that the notorious traitor Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock was being hunted
by every member of the Imperial military and police establishments as the perpetrator of the attack on his
own family.
Despite that. . . .


тАФArnold Liu-Hamner, PhD,
from "Chapter 27:The Chaos Years Begin,"
The MacClintock Legacy, Volume 17, 7th edition, ┬й 3517,
Souchon, Fitzhugh, & Porter Publishing,
Old Earth




Imprimus, they nuked the spaceport.
The one-kiloton kinetic energy weapon was a chunk of iron the size of a small aircar. He watched it
burn on the view screens of the captured Saint special operations ship as it entered the upper atmosphere
of the planet Marduk and tracked in perfectly. It exploded in a flash of light and plasma, and the
mushroom cloud reached up into the atmosphere, spreading a cloud of dust over the nearer Krath
villages.
The spaceport was deserted at the moment it turned into plasma. Everything movable, which had
turned out to be everything but the buildings and fixed installations, had been stripped from it. The Class
One manufacturing facility, capable of making clothes and tools and small weapons, had been secreted at
Voitan, along with most of the untrustworthy humans, including all of the surviving Saint Greenpeace
commandos who had been captured with the ship. They could work in the Voitan mines, help rebuild the