"S. M. Stirling - Draka 04 - Drakon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

 (All errors of fact, taste and

interpretation are mine.)




CHAPTER ONE

DOMINATION TIMELINE

EARTH/1

MAY 21, 442nd YEAR OF THE FINAL SOCIETY

(2442 A.D.)



Gwendolyn Ingolfsson stood naked beside the stream. It was an early spring day in the central
Rockies, chilly and intensely fresh. Wind whispered quietly through the fir trees dotted through the upland
valley, down from the snowpeaks to the west, and fluttered the new leaves of the aspens. It carried the
scent of grass and trees, rock, small burrowing things, more faintly elk and—she inhaled—a grizzly, off a
kilometer or two upwind. For a moment she gave herself to the wind and silence, face turned to the
morning sun, watching a condor sweep its shadow across the flower-starred meadows.

Then she turned back to her camp. The fire was out, her last meal of hand-caught trout and rabbit
scorched scraps in the ashes. Beside it was a tripod of spears, shaped ashwood tipped with chipped flint
heads bound on by rawhide; her obsidian knife and hide bag hung from them. For a moment she considered
taking some of the gear for keepsake, then shook her head. The memory would stay with her, of making
them and using them these past six months; let wood and leather and stone rot and tumble and the land
grow over them. Or let another find and use them; there were two or three species in this reserve with the
hands and the wit, perhaps even feral humans.

She spoke to her transducer: now.

The wait was not long. Her ears pricked forward at the whistle of cloven air. A speck fell out of
the sky, became a matte-gray flattened wedge ten meters long by five wide. It settled to the ground with a
faint sigh and a doorway opened. Gwen sighed herself as she stepped through into the long open room
within, regret mingled with pleasure. Back to civilization.

"Temperature twenty-one," she said aloud.

The air warmed. She ran a palm cleaner over her body—time for the comfort of hot water
later—and dressed in a set of blacks from a container. Another container scanned her before releasing a
leather weapons belt, old but well-kept; she checked the charge on the plasma gun automatically, a
nostalgic feeling. Obsolete, almost as much as the layer knife on the opposite hip, but she'd carried this very
weapon on the last human-hunts here in North America; she was old enough to remember that, the
biobombs and the kill-sweeps. Then she sat in the recliner at the nose of the aircraft.