"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 16 - Other Times Than Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

read widely across the spectrum of SF/fantasy, and I don't see much difference between writing one type
and another. The stories I like are about characters—about people—and that's a constant in all genres.

These stories include one of my earliest as well as the two most recent (as of this writing). Some are
self-standing, some were written for series of my own, and several were written for shared universes.
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There are light stories and some of the grimmest things I've ever written. (Yes, I know what I'm saying.)
Some are carefully researched historicals, some take place in the far future, and one was set in the place
and time where I wrote it.

What the stories have in common is that they're all about war. Some of the protagonists are fighting for
the survival of the human species; some are fighting for national political ends; and many are simply
fighting because it's their job. The reasons don't really matter to the people at the sharp end.

And above all, these are stories about people.

Dave Drake
david-drake.com

Lambs to the Slaughter

A trumpet called, giving the go-ahead to a detachment leaving by one of the other gates of the Harbor.
Half of Froggie's bored troopers looked up; a few even hopped to their feet.

The century's band of local females roused, clucking like a hen-coop at dinner time and grasping the
poles of the handcarts holding the troopers' noncombat gear. Slats, the six-limbed administrator who
Froggie was escorting out to some barb village the gods knew where, clambered into his palanquin and
ordered his bearers to lift him.

"Everybody sit down and wait for orders!" Froggie said in a voice that boomed through the chatter.
"Which will come from me, Sedulus, so you can get your ass back into line. When I want you to lead the
advance, I'll tell you."

That'd be some time after Hermes came down and announced Sedulus was the son of Jupiter, Froggie
guessed.

Three days after Froggie was born, his father had lifted him before the door of their hut in the Alban Hills
and announced that the infant, Marcus Vibius Taena, was his legitimate son and heir. He'd been
nicknamed Ranunculus, Froggie, the day the training centurion heard him bellow cadence the first time.
Froggie's what he'd been since then; that or Top, after he'd been promoted to command the Third
Century of the Fourth Cohort in one of the legions Crassus had taken east to conquer Parthia.

Froggie'd continued in that rank when the Parthians sold their Roman prisoners to a man in a blue suit,
who wasn't a man as it turned out. A very long time ago,that was.

The girls subsided, cackling merrily. Queenie, the chief girl, called something to the others that Froggie