The Prince's Pen by Horatio Clare

Author:Horatio Clare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 9781854115638
Publisher: Seren
Published: 2013-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

Others have written their accounts. It was not down to Ludo – no. Even after Crian it might have been different, but the country was too small, the confrontation too desperate and desperately cramped, the stakes too high. We were as two Piranhas fighting in a coal hole: only one could live. In Sennybridge, and, we soon learned, around the country, the assault succeeded dreadfully.

Imagine being them. Suddenly the barbarians are over the wire. Your best weapons, your Killbots, turn on you and they are remorseless. Your own drones are slaughtering you. Your air cover has gone, your helicopters are carnaged, your computers won’t talk to you, your phones are dead, anything in the air can’t talk to the ground, your planes are blind, your artillery and fixed positions are being hit by drones or satellites, your mates are dead, your commanders are dead, no one’s coming to help, you can’t get a medic... Some will still fight then, the Specials will, some NCOs and sundry hard nuts, and some did – but the enlisted boys and girls? The ones who were just doing a job? In the back of many minds was the old All-For-One. If we just surrender we’ll go home, they think.

We could not understand most of what they said, the odd word here and there, but screams need no translation. By the time Ludo and I arrived – you should have seen him striding in, hot for it, looking for someone to fight! – our people were giving coups de grace to their wounded, and also to their unwounded. I saw a seventeen-year-old girl with a pistol striding along a line of prisoners. She gut-shot every one: three in the time it took me to get across and stop her. Guts is bad, too. Terrible.

‘What in hell are you doing?’ I scream at her.

‘Killing fuckers!’ she squeals.

I saw then how it would go, as I looked at her, with the bodies she had maimed floundering on the ground behind her. And I sensed that what we were doing we would pay for, though I had no idea how.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.