"Ringo,.John.-.Posleen.08.-.Posleen.FanFic.-.Kimmel,.Leigh.-.Waechter-Williamson,.Richard.-.Gries,.Shane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

Beso was just helping her over the tailgate when one of the Cossacks heeled his horse over to them. Although he carried a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, the traditional Cossack saber and whip hung at the belt of his cherkessa.
Nanuli's eyes shied away from the string of claw-tipped Posleen thumbs that dangled from the high cantle of his saddle, trophies of past encounters. "I was concerned there might be injuries." Russian came awkwardly to her tongue.
The Cossack, Grisha, nodded although his lips curled downward in a tight frown. "Yes, Doctor, but it is dangerous for you to be walking about by yourself."
Nanuli started to protest, then realized how right he was. A doctor was too valuable to risk running about unprotected. And her old bones might well shatter from a simple slip and fall that would only bruise one of these young fellows.
Much as it hurt her pride, she accepted his offer of escort. She walked beside his stirrup as his horse ambled along the column of halted vehicles. At least everyone had gotten stopped in time; she saw no fresh dents on fender or bumper, and the people within showed no sign of injuries, just boredom festering into frustration.
Grisha noticed the latter as well. "Enough sitting around. Top off your tanks, all of you."
From the vehicle climbed men of every nationality of the Caucasus: Chechens, Circassians, Inguish, even an Armenian. They pulled the big gas cans from their mountings over the vehicles' rear bumpers and set to work.
Nanuli kept a close eye for any injuries. At least the war had made tobacco almost impossible to get, so no one was smoking while handling gasoline. But there were plenty of other ways to get hurt.
As soon as she arrived at Ataman Masuyev's command car, she saw the blown-out tire that had sent it sliding into the rocks at the side of the road. The fender had crumpled like tinfoil, but she didn't smell antifreeze, so it should be just superficial damage, and they could drive away as soon as they got the tire changed.
Ataman Masuyev thrust his head out an open window. "Good, you brought the doctor. Isaak took a knock on the head."
Nanuli bit back the urge to point out that she'd come on her own initiative and Grisha had only escorted her. Antagonizing the Cossack ataman would only delay getting to Isaak, and concussions were not anything to trifle with.
Although what can you do, with no air evac, no hospitals, no neurosurgeons?
At least the ataman's vehicle had a wide running board which made getting in much easier for old bones. Within, a thin, hawk-nosed young man half-reclined across the back seat and cradled his head in his hands. He moaned each time the vehicle rocked.
"Hello, Isaak." Nanuli spoke slowly and distinctly, her voice pitched low to avoid irritating him.
The young man looked up, blinked. No sign of bleeding from the ears or blackening around the eyes, so he shouldn't have a fractured skull. The pupils were dilated evenly, which meant he shouldn't have any brain damage, although she didn't like the dazed look in his eyes.
She looked directly into those dark eyes, hoped that he wasn't from one of the nationalities who could take direct eye contact from a woman the wrong way. "Do you know what happened to you?"
He rubbed at his scalp, said something in a language that she couldn't follow. In addition to Russian and her native Georgian, Nanuli also knew Svanuri and Megruli, but those two were about as closely related to Georgian as Polish or Bulgarian was to Russian. Whatever Isaak was speaking, it didn't sound at all familiar.
"Isaak, I don't understand you. Can you speak Russian?"
He nodded, slow and careful in the manner of someone favoring an injured part. His "da" of affirmation was shaky, but at least he'd successfully switched languages. However, the mental shakeup of being injured could make one forget a second language.
"Do you know where we are?"
Isaak looked over Nanuli's shoulder to the open door behind her. "In the mountains."
He left gory in the nominative plural instead of switching to the locative plural as he should have with the preposition v, but she didn't know his pre-injury level of skill with Russian grammar. Not all Caucasian languages had as complicated a case system as Georgian. More significant was his quick look to check, and that over-general answer. He should know that they were on the Georgian Military Highway, just south of Vladikavkaz.
"So how is he, Doc?" Ataman Masuyev's voice boomed loud in the enclosed vehicle.
Nanuli gestured for him to keep his voice down, stepped over to speak to him without Isaak hearing. "He has a concussion. A mild one, so he will recover, but only time will heal him, and until then he will need rest--"
"Damnation, woman, I can't afford to lose my only comm tech." Masuyev jabbed a thick finger at her. "That Jew-boy's too good with electronics for this kind of crap."
Nanuli flinched. She'd suspected that Isaak was one of the Mountain Jews of Dagestan, but she hadn't expected so crude a confirmation.
Still, it wouldn't be productive to remind the Cossack ataman that the polite term for a person of Jewish faith or descent was evrei. Instead she spoke in her level doctor-to-angry-parent voice. "Since Isaak is your best comm tech, you will not want to endanger him by pushing him before he's recovered."
Masuyev growled, but before he could say anything, there was a strange wailing cry from the tail of the caravan, followed by gunfire and the scream of an equine in pain.
"Dammit, we're under attack." Masuyev grabbed Nanuli, pushed her down. "Get out of the way, woman. I won't have you killed playing the goddamn hero." He grabbed his own AK, stuffed it out the window and looked for something to shoot.
The roughness of his action forced a gasp of pain out of Nanuli, but she didn't think he'd done her any real injury. Much as the rough handling affronted her dignity, she realized that he was right about his need to protect her from her own foolish heroism. There was simply nothing for her to do but stay under cover as best she could until she was actually needed. Even then, at her age she could hardly play the battlefield medic running under fire to the side of the wounded.
Still, she could make herself ready. Even from her vantage point, she had a decent view of the caravan, of the yellow shapes moving up the road behind them.
Posleen.
Only why weren't they firing their weapons? Nanuli remembered the hiss-crack of Posleen weapons all too well from the fall of Gori, from the flight to the mountains and the terrified days of running through the Likhi Range and into the Great Caucasus, a flight that had taken her to the inaccessible fastness of Upper Svaneti. Here she heard only the rat-a-tat-tat of Kalashnikovs being fired, now in disciplined three-round bursts, and the occasional pop of a Nagan pistol.
She noticed a set of field glasses in their case beside Isaak's sheepskin hat. An inquisitive glance to him and he gestured for her to go ahead. Maybe she was taking advantage of his infirmity, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that she had no intention of placing the priceless equipment in any greater danger.
She focused them on the lead Posleen, then readjusted the focus, unable to believe what she saw. They weren't firing their weapons because they didn't have any, just their bare claws. They didn't even wear gear harnesses.
Yellow fluid gouted from a row of holes that stitched across the alien's chest. All four legs buckled under it and it fell sideways onto the rocks at the side of the cracked pavement. Its toothy maw opened in a gape that might be pain, or just muscles relaxing in death. For certain other muscles were relaxing, since the mountain breeze carried a fecal stink.
The next Posleen paused to swivel its head toward its fallen comrade, gaped and ran a thick pink tongue along razor teeth as if trying to decide whether to start eating the available corpse or continue the attack on the humans. That hesitation cost the centauroid its life, as a shot blew right through its vulnerable eye and sent pinkish brain tissue fountaining out the other side.
The firing continued further back, along with those high keening cries, but Nanuli couldn't see anything for the vehicles and the granite outcropping around which the switchback bent. Somehow it hadn't seemed quite so sharp when she'd walked it with Grisha. She could only hope that Soselo and his father were faring well. Masuyev certainly wouldn't let her go back to check while the fighting was on, and when it was over, her first priority would be tending the injured.
Nanuli's ears were still ringing from the last shots when a bearded man banged his fist on the door. "Dmitri Petrovich! Where's that doctor of yours?"
The moment he spoke Nanuli recognized him, and immediately wished she hadn't. Mahmood Dudayev was a Chechen, but unlike most of his people, he did not practice the Sufi branch of Islam. Rather he was a Wahhabi, and fiercely proud of the time he had spent in a training camp in Afghanistan with a pan-Islamic militant organization, before returning to the Caucasus to fight the Posleen. He also had a big thing about purity, and according to his notions of it, just so much as talking to a woman outside his kinship circle was polluting.
Damn, but she hated the way that man would talk to whatever male she was near, instead of speaking to her. She pulled herself up, squared her shoulders and looked him straight in the eye. "I am Dr. Tamarashvili. Where are the injuries?"
Mahmood tensed, started to swivel his head over to look at her, only to suppress the reaction and keep his attention on the Cossack ataman. "They're strung all up and down the road. Cuts and bruises for the most part, but Vartan took a ricochet and Akhmeti got it real bad before we could take that last poska down." He used the derogatory diminutive of "Posleen" that the Cossacks had started.
Nanuli retrieved her medkit and pulled herself to her feet. A bruise on her hip complained at the movement, but her leg bore her weight, so Masuyev's push hadn't broken the bone. She'd just be sore for a while, and in the meantime she had patients to tend. She gritted her teeth and climbed down.
"Take me to them. Akhmeti first, and then Vartan." She hoped she wasn't making a mistake putting the Armenian second.
The men were already dealing with the dead Posleen, cutting off each centaur's right thumb as a trophy, then shoving the rest of the carcass off the side of the road. The stink of Posleen blood and feces filled the air. And more than a little human as well -- even if no one had died, some of them had obviously lost control of their bowels in the fear-filled moments of the firefight.
"Ekh, what's this?" One of the Circassians lifted the head of one Posleen, careful not to let any of the blood from the throat wound smear his red cherkessa. When he twisted the creature's head, a feathery crest ruffed up from the long serpentine neck.
"Looks like a God-King." His companion, a Kalmyk to judge by his Tatar features and the style of his wooden-scabbarded kindjal, curled his lips in a thin smile of admiration. "Only where's his little saucer-thing?"
"Hard to tell." The Circassian slid his kindjal out and set to cutting the God-King's head free. Such a trophy would command much honor, since God-Kings were hard to take intact. Their saucer-shaped personal ground-effect craft had a habit of exploding when hit, taking out not only the God-King but most of his honor-guard.
"They must've been desperate, coming at us like that without a single gun for the lot of them."
"That or ferals. Although I've never seen ferals work together like this. Wonder if you can have a feral God-King?" The Circassian twisted his trophy free with a crack of bone snapping.