"Simon Hawke - Timewars 3 - The Pimpernel Plot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

and he formally submitted his publication, along with its
supporting research and conclusions, to the world leaders.
Once again he argued passionately, this time for the immediate
cessation of the Time Wars. This time, they listened. Resolutions
were made, voted on, and passed. However, the one
resolution Mensinger most wanted to see passed was tabled
due to the lack of agreement among the members of the council.
Mensinger left the meeting in despair, a broken man. The
Time Wars continued.

Time Wars #3

The Pimpernel Plot
Prologue
The city square was utterly silent as the crowd waited in
tense, almost reverential anticipation. The only sounds that
broke the stillness were the praying of the man atop the wooden
platform, the sobbing of his wife at the bottom of the steps,
and the squeaking of the pulley as the blade was slowly raised.
The man’s prayer was rudely interrupted as he was seized and
forced down to his knees, his head jammed into position. The
lever was tripped, there was a brief scraping sound as the blade
descended swiftly and then a duller sound, not unlike that of
an axe sinking into wood. The man’s head fell into the wicker
basket and the crowd roared its approval.
Joseph Ignace Guillotin’s device, proposed in the Assembly
by the venerable physician as a “merciful” method of execution,
had not been in use for more than a few months, but its
blade had already been thoroughly tempered in the blood of
the victims of the Revolution. The mob had stormed the
Tuileries and the Swiss Guards, who had been ordered to cease
firing by the king, were massacred. Louis XVI was held prisoner
with his family in the old house of the Knights Templars
and the provisional government was in the hands of Georges
Jacques Danton of the Cordeliers. Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch
Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, whose Declaration
of the Rights of Man had been hailed and accepted by the
National Assembly as the embodiment of the principles of
[[“Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite,”]] had been branded a traitor
and had fled for his life to Austria. The bloody September Massacres,
in which over one thousand aristocrats would be sacrificed
on the altar of the new regime, were underway. The
rest of Europe would be deeply shocked at the events in Paris,
at Versailles, in Lyons, Rheims, Meaux, and Orleans; however,
they were just a prelude to the excesses of the Jacobins under
Time Wars #3
Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.
With glazed eyes, Alex Corderro watched the man’s decapitated
body being dragged off the guillotine. The executioner
paused only long enough to give the blade a quick wipe with a