"Adams, Robert - Horseclans 09 - The Witch Godess" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Robert)

Aware that mules and all herd animals tended to be calmer in proximity to others of their kind, Corbett led his mule over to where he had hitched Braun's mount. It was just then that Erica came slowly limping out of the brush, her face and hands thorn-scored and dripping blood, her black hair in wild disarray and filled with leaves and twigs.

"Where's that bastard of a mule I was riding, Jay? Have you seen the fucker?"

He handed her the reins of Braun's mount. "Take this one, Doctor—Braun won't be using one soon, I'm afraid. Yours is dead. After it threw you, it went bonkers and Gumpner had to shoot it."

"If he hadn't shot the misbegotten son of a bitch, I would've," Erica said grimly. "I couldn've easily been killed, blinded by those goddamn thorns."

Corbett shook his head reprovingly. "Doctor, you can't fault dumb beasts for fearing earth tremors. Or men, either, for that matter."

"But, damn it, Jay, I…" And the earth heaved again, ferociously, tripping her still-wobbly legs from under her.

Both of the mules brayed their terror and reared, their big, steel-shod forehooves flailing. Corbett let drop the scabbarded rifle he had just removed from his own mount and, placing himself between the terror-stricken animals, took a tenacious grip on their headstalls and rode up and down with their rearings, using his weight to bring them down more quickly and his voice to calm them.

Because of his preoccupation with the mounts and the fact that he and they were facing south, he did not see the calamity that in the mere blinking of an eye befell the bulk of the precious pack train and the men accompanying it. But he heard it. He heard and felt it, and he knew. Even before he turned to see, he knew.

Sergeant Major Vance, obediently following Corbett's order, had himself ordered most of the rearguard off the track and well out from the cliffs. Then he and a few picked men, on half-maddened and barely controllable ponies, had galloped south along the track, trying desperately to see the other order carried out—getting the pack train off the track, away from the beetling line of cliffs and over the line of low hillocks to the west.

But, due principally to the hysterical state of most of the riding and pack beasts, it was a nearly impossible task, and precious few men and animals were beyond the point of danger when the second massive series of shudders shook the rocky earth and, with a grinding-crashing roar, the entire line of cliffs buckled and tumbled down, burying men, beasts and loads beneath uncountable tons of shattered rock.
Chapter Two

"Oh, sweet Jesus," Corbett said softly, sadly, looking at the rocky mass grave the line of cliffs had so suddenly become. Where the two scientists—Arenstein and Braun—might and soon would .bewail the loss of the devices, books and metals, the officer could think just now only of his men, his dead men.

He had known those men most of their lives, had trained and worked with them from their mid-teens, just as he had with their fathers, before them. He had ridden and marched and, occasionally, fought beside them; he had shared camp and fire and cookpot and hooch with them, heat and cold, danger and privation. He had long ago earned their warm love and their deep respect, both of which he had returned. And now they were dead, most of them, and he knew that he never again would even see their bodies.

And a part of him harbored a deep hunger to be there with his command, to lie dead beside them under those chunks of rock, to be finally, fully dead at last, as he should have been centuries ago. Major James Hiram Corbett, USA, had been a deeply religious man; indeed, only paternal pressure and his appointment to the USMA at West Point had kept him out of a seminary and the ministry.

He had retained his faith through the academy and through the service years, thereafter. He had remained religious up until the first time he had had to choose between a painful death and a transfer of his consciousness into a younger, vibrantly healthy body. And each succeeding transfer over the hundreds of years since that first one had chipped off a bit more of his original faith. But still there remained a flinty core of the edifice which once had been so grand and imposing, and that core still nagged him, troubled him on occasion.

It troubled him now. "Dave Sternheimer, that pompous ass, throws fits every time someone forgets and brings up what the mutants call us—vampires; yet, that's precisely what we all are—unnatural creatures, maintained in our deathlessness by a godless perversion of science.

"We all should rightly have died with the nation, the world that spawned us, and since we didn't, we have remorselessly levied a tribute of young men and women—living flesh and blood to sustain us—from every succeeding generation. Small wonder that normal folk and those mutants call us 'witches' and 'vampires,' for to this world we are the very monsters of antique legend. Minotaurs we are, and Kennedy Research Center the maze. How long, I wonder, before this world produces a Theseus to finally rid mankind of the murderous, unholy parasites we've become? Perhaps this Milo Morai, the mutant who has lived since before the War, will extirpate us, will one day cleanse the world of our sinful works and send our souls on to whatever hellish torments our misdeeds have earned us. Not even sweet, gentle Jesus could be expected to be merciful toward such a pack of selfish, merciless…"

His mind came abruptly back to the present situation and to the knowledge that something was wrong, very wrong. He had assumed that the high-mounting dust from the collapse of the cliffs had been dimming the sun, but though that dust was subsiding, the light still grew steadily paler, and he cast his gaze to all quarters seeking a reason."

Then that questing gaze was suddenly locked upon the northern horizon. There, looking close enough to reach out an arm and touch it, towered an immense, furiously roiling cloud of multihued smoke, steam and dust. Thick as any mountain, it stood, rising to a height of at least a full mile!

"The volcano!" he whispered to himself in awe. "My God, my God, what have we, what have / wrought?"

So rapt was Corbett that when Erica hobbled up again and touched his arm, he started. 'That… that thing is a volcano, Jay; I've seen them before, in Cuba. Do… do you think it's possible that… that our… ?"

"Oh, yes, Doctor," he interrupted her, his voice savage. "It's our own, devil-spawned, twentieth-century witchery that's responsible for that… and, God forgive us, for that!" He waved his arm at the site of the deadly rockfall.

"Of course!" She nodded quickly. "With his knowledge of geology, Braun should have expected this mess or something like it. Sternheimer will have a fit when he hears of it, of the loss of all those machines and devices, but we can still bring a crew up here, after we get back to Broomtown, and salvage the metals, most likely, even if nothing else. We— For the love of… !" She took a hasty step back, her hands raised defensively, instinctively, before her. "Jay! What's wrong with you? You… you look as if you… you're ready to… to kill someone!"

"You and Braun and Dave Sternheimer and your goddam precious, priceless ancient relics! Doesn't it matter one damn bit to you, you harpy, that they're likely half a hundred dead men under those rocks—my men, good, loyal, decent men? Can't you realize that it was our larcenous selfishness that murdered not only those helpless folk up yonder where that volcano is now, but our own Broomtowners, as well?"

As a soul-deep agony began to replace the killing light in his eyes, Erica's fear too ebbed and she felt it safe to shrug, saying, "Fortunes of war. You're a soldier, Jay, and so were they. You all take the same risks in that trade, don't you?"