"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 29 - Treasure of the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

kept going.

The sun went down in an awesome display of orange, purple, and red which seemed to cover half the
sky. Blade kept moving until the light was nearly gone and even his superb night vision could barely make
out the ground in front of him. Then he found a narrow V between two roots of a large tree, drifted full of
dead leaves. He crept in on hands and knees, settled himself with his back against the trunk, and piled
over his legs and stomach all the leaves he could reach.

It wasn't much protection, and he could only hope that none of the bat-cats would come by while he
slept. It was still better than stumbling on through the night, more tired and chilled with each mile.

Blade slid lower into the leaves, piled more over his chest, then lay back to sleep.

Blade awoke when the sky was still a dirty gray, as a familiar sound blasted across the forest and jerked
him out of sleep. It was the roar of a low-flying jet plane.

Blade sprang to his feet, wide awake and looking around for the nearest spot where he could see the
sky. A quick look told him there wasn't any nearer than the riverbank. He dashed down the slope,
narrowly missing trees, leaping over stumps and fallen logs, reaching the open just as the sound of the jet
faded away to the south.

Before he could draw in enough breath to curse, he heard more jets approaching from the north. He had
time to step back into the trees far enough to see without being seen. Then the jets raced overhead less
than a thousand feet up. They were flying slowly enough to give Blade a good view of them.

He'd heard of drawing-board projects like these jets, but he'd never seen or heard of anything like them
getting off the ground anywhere in Home Dimension. The fuselages were disk-shaped, flattened and
nearly as wide as they were long. Twin rudders jutted up from the rear of the disk, and on either side
projected short swept-back wings.

A pair of jet engines was sunk into the root of each wing and a cluster of gray cylinders looking
unpleasantly like bombs hung from a rack near each wingtip. The undersides of the planes were
blue-gray and the tops camouflaged in blobs and stripes of green and brown. There was some sort of
insignia on the wings, but the planes were gone before Blade could make it out.

The whistle and roar of the jets died away. Blade walked a little farther under the cover of the trees
before sitting down to think. He didn't want to run any risk of being spotted now. If those gray cylinders
were really bombs, each plane was carrying enough to demolish a good stretch of forest if they thought
he was a suitable target.

He wished he'd been able to make out the insignia on the planes. It would have answered one awkward
question. Those jets looked odd, but they were at about the same technological level as Home
Dimension. Blade knew only one world in Dimension X where this was so-the strange world where an
other-England called the Empire of Englor fought an other-Russia called Russland. Was he back in that
Dimension, one of the weirdest and deadliest he'd ever visited?

If he was, he might have a problem. The presence of the jets suggested he was in territory ruled by one
or the other of the two great powers. There was no wilderness like this anywhere in Englor or any of its
allies, as far as he knew. Was he in Russland or some Russland satellite?