"Charles Ingrid - The Sand Wars 06 - Challenge Met" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ingrid Charles)

that Regis will lose his throne and his life. But this is a nightmare from
which he cannot awake. The transport ships will never arrive, except for a
few. Recall will not be sounded. The Knights are among those troops
deemed to be expendable. And even as he remembers, has the sum total of
his life given back to him, childhood, family, adolescence, a shadow follows
him. Like a snake of darkness, it swallows up his thoughts even as he's fully
regained them, and he can never go backward, only forward into his mind.
 Desperately, he tries to confront the snake which is devouring all that he
has been given back. It is hot inside the armor, and his grid is blurred by his
own sweat, and the various leads clipped to his torso are more than
irritating, they have become painful. The chamois at his back absorbs the
salt and water dripping down.

Thraks are attacking, yes, but that is memory and this attack from
within—it is reality. He has been betrayed again.

As he reaches out with his thoughts, a spark arcs out. He is trapped by
Thraks, his men are down, power going, abandoned to the sand and he feels
the new life stirring at his back. It reaches out for him, a white blossoming
fire that beats back the dark devouring snake.

Bogie. Bogie was alive with him, even then! And the realization repels Jack
as he is caught within his mind, watching battle armor split like brittle
eggshells, not to free his men, but to spit out immense saurian creatures,
hatched from the helpless bodies of his men, frills spread in berserker
frenzy, to attack both Knights and Thraks. The Milots, knowing they are
losing their world, have indeed seeded the parasitic berserker lizards in
whatever flesh they can. Barracks rumor has become nightmare reality.

And his own alien bonds flesh with him even as Jack fights to live.

The furious will to survive carries him through.

Gauntlet fire cuts down the Thraks, their carapaces popping and fizzing
in the flame, and even his suit, too drained now to work efficiently, feels the
heat. He has come full circle as the recall signal pulses across his com. He
looks across a pit of Thrakian chiton and human flesh into a shadow, a blot
of darkness across his visor and finally, stupidly, recognizes a transport.

They are being scraped off the surface of Milos like so many squashed
bugs… all that is left of the Dominion's finest. He knows what battle fatigue
is, and shock, and swims though it anyway, grabbing an arm strap from the
transport hover, and stepping onto the running board as it lifts him from a
pit of death—and he's the only one still up and moving. He waits
impassively as the hover brings him cross-country to staging where, he can
tell, evacuation is in an absolute rout.

A tech helps him peel off the suit, nose wrinkling at the smell and reek of
his imprisonment. Sweat drips off him like a toxic wash. He kicks out of his
boots and leaves the equipment, not looking back. The noise and turmoil of