The Romanov Rescue
- Автор: Кратман Том, Watson Justin
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Baen
- ISBN: 978-1-9821-2570-7
- Жанр: Альтернативная история
Электронная книга - «The Romanov Rescue». Краткое содержание книги:
As WWI comes to a close a German general, an escaped prisoner of war, and the crew of an airship converge to effect THE ROMANOV RESCUE. Can there be a world without communism?
Mankind’s history is bound up in the fabric of fate, a strong cloth, tough and closely woven.
It is the beginning of 1918, the last year of the greatest war in human history, to date. All the belligerents stagger on their feet. Starvation is an ever present reality, while disease waits in the wings. In Russia, no longer a belligerent but, instead, rapidly descending into civil war and chaos, a lone family—Father, Mother, four beautiful young girls, and a brave but sickly boy—await their own fate, shivering and hungry in the dark, hoping and praying for salvation.
Their relatives in England have turned their backs. The guards set over them do little but torment them. They look Heavenward, but God doesn’t answer. They know they’re a threat to the new regime, a threat that will, in time, be eliminated.
But even the strongest fabric has flaws. An escaped prisoner of war, caught, injured, and punished, but still highly capable, might be one. An airship, returned and at loose ends after a failed mission to Africa might be another. A German general, taking a wrong turn on his nightly walk and suddenly coming face to face with the reality of the monster rising in the east, would be a third.
Follow, then, as the general gives the orders, the prisoner of war raises the men from among his fellows, and the airship launches itself forward, to contest fate, to tear the fabric of time, and to effect The Romanov Rescue.
About the Carrera series:
“Do what?” Dostovalov said, then realizing his stupidity, shook his head. “Oh! Olga, we can’t.”
With a boldness that set Dostovalov on his heels, Olga stepped forward and grabbed his hardened cock through his pants.
“Oh, I think we can,” she said quietly, her breath taking on the same rapid cadence as his.
It would be so easy. Olga was easily the most beautiful girl—woman—in face and form he’d ever seen much less laid hands on. So easy to pull aside their clothes and have each other. God, he’d never wanted anything more.
“No, Olga,” he said, his deep voice tremorous. “God, what if your parents found out? What if you got pregnant?”
“I’m twenty-two and have never known a man, Anton,” she said, her voice shaking with passion and fear. “I won’t live long enough to marry; we both know that. I want a man, and I want it to be you.”
“You will,” Dostovalov whispered fiercely. “You will live to marry. I’ll see to it. I will kill anyone who touches you.”
“But you won’t touch me yourself,” Olga said, bitterly, turning away and putting her hands on the kitchen table. Her shoulders heaved as she took several deep breaths, keeping her back to him.
Dostovalov hesitated, then put his arms around her and pulled her back against himself. Olga resisted only briefly before leaning back into his embrace.
“I absolutely will touch you,” Dostovalov said, and Olga gasped as he gently cupped her breasts with his hands. “And just because we can’t consummate doesn’t mean you have to go to bed in agony.”
His left hand lifted the lacy hem of her nightgown and slid up the smooth skin of her thigh. Olga’s words were lost in a low moan of pleasure.
Tatiana awoke in the middle of the night from a terrible dream, shadowy figures shouted accusations from behind gravestones, hurled litanies of sin against her with judgments of death and worse as her sentence. The black wraiths ripped her father and mother to shreds with flashing teeth, they cut little Alexei at the wrists and left him to spill his life onto the floor. They engulfed and consumed Olga, Maria, and Anastasia, leaving behind only contorted, broken corpses.
Worst of all, she was sure in her dream that the litanies were true, the crimes they laid before her real. She sat bolt upright, breathing fast, sweating despite the cold. Taking several shuddering breaths, Tatiana steadied herself.
Just the same room we were in last night, and the night before that and the night before that.
Tatiana swung her legs out from underneath the layers of heavy blankets and put her feet on the cold planks of the floor. A search of the room revealed two gently snoring mounds where Anastasia and Maria lay, but on Olga’s bed…
Oh, damn it.
Tatiana rose hurriedly and draped herself in a heavy fur coat. She stepped out into the hallway, determined to catch her idiot sister in her ill-considered assignation with the big guard and force her to put a stop to it. A flicker of light, movement from beyond the glass door to the balcony caught her eye. The shorter guard, Chekov, the one who’d spoken kindly to her and brutally to her father stood on the balcony. Compelled by dreadful curiosity, the same kind of curiosity that leads one to poke at a sore tooth or pick at a scab, Tatiana diverted course and, on unsteady legs, walked down the hall to confront the guard who had dared snap at her father like an unruly recruit.
Chekov relished the bitterly cold night air out on the balcony. Anything was better than the company inside. The cold, unyielding stars were far superior in their silent regard to conversation with a delusional former autocrat, no matter how lovely his family.
How could he have been so stupid? Chekov shook his head at his own folly; letting himself get drawn into a conversation with Nikolashka. The man who’d ignored and avoided his duties as sovereign until the country was starving and on the brink of collapse. The idiot who’d played tennis even as the Imperial Fleet sank during the war with the Japanese. The simpleton who had the temerity to take personal command of armies engaged in the largest conflagration in human history when he wasn’t fit to manage a mess tent.
But most of all, the bastard who spared my mother’s murderers.
Chekov slammed a fist into the stone of the balcony railing.
I hope the Reds do shoot the sonofabitch.
Hours passed in silence. The Romanovs retired for the evening shortly after the chess match. The Red Guards across the street appeared to have bedded down. Chekov was left alone with his dark thoughts until well past midnight.
The balcony door creaked open behind him. Chekov turned expecting to find an angry Dostovalov coming through the door to confront him now that the Romanovs were asleep.
“Save the lecture, Anton—”
Instead of his tall, burly friend, Tatiana Romanova regarded him steadily from the doorway, starlight glinting in her sad, searching eyes.
“You hate us, yet you guard us,” she said, without preamble. “Why?”
“I don’t hate you, or your siblings,” Chekov said, looking back out into the night. “You’re children; children who should be in bed. It’s very late and it is freezing out here.”
“I don’t think you’re much older than me,” Tatiana said. “And you didn’t answer my question. If you hate my father so much why aren’t you across the street with them?”
She nodded at the Kornilov House, which now held some of the Red Guards.
“I’m older than you’ll ever be,” Chekov said. “And I don’t owe you an answer, miss.”
“No, you don’t,” Tatiana agreed, but still she stood there, staring at him.
Chekov held her gaze for a long time, jaw clenched. In the end the words came, useless as they were, because he wanted this beautiful, good, brave girl to know the truth of the world she lived in, the one her parents had sheltered her from her whole life. Perhaps it was unnecessary cruelty, but he wanted her to understand.
“What do you know about the Kishinev Pogrom?” Chekov said.
Tatiana just shook her head and pulled her fur coat tighter about herself.
“Yes, that’s what I thought,” Chekov said, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “I’m not Jewish, but my mother was. Or at least she grew up a Jew, she converted to marry my father.”
“Oh,” Tatiana said.
“Yes, ‘oh,’” Chekov said around the cigarette as he flicked his lighter open. “When I was seven years old, she went to visit her parents in Kishinev. She had just convinced them to talk to her again after she left their faith.”
Chekov took a long drag on his cigarette and his eyes lost their focus. Tatiana stood silently watching him, her expression grim. Chekov blew a cloud of tobacco smoke through his nostrils that mingled inextricably with the icy vapor of his breath.
“Father wouldn’t tell me what really happened,” Chekov said. “Just that mother had died and gone ahead of us to heaven. It wasn’t until some years later I found out how she ‘went to heaven.’”
Tatiana’s face was deathly pale now, her eyes wide as she listened to him. Chekov hesitated, then, his features settling into something cold, bitter, almost alien, he continued.
“Seven men broke into my grandfather’s home in Kishinev, slit his throat and stabbed my grandmother in the chest. My mother was still young enough to catch their eye, though. They held her down and took turns beating and raping her. She died of internal bleeding somewhere in the process,” Chekov said, his voice utterly hollow. “But the bastards did a sloppy job on grandmother. She survived her stab wound and brought charges of rape and murder before a magistrate. Miracle of miracles, they were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.”