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Informationen zum Autor Taylor Anderson Klappentext Major Lewis Cayce will need to use every weapon in his arsenal to keep his stranded men alive on a deadly alternate Earth in this gripping new adventure set in the world of the New York Times bestselling Destroyermen series. It is 1847, and almost a full year after being shipwrecked on another, far stranger and more dangerous Earth on their way to fight Santa Anna in the Mexican-American War, Lewis Cayce and his small group of artillerymen, infantrymen, and dragoons have made friends in the Yucatán, helped build an army, and repulsed the first efforts of the blood-drenched Holy Dominion to wipe their new friends out. As an even more radical cult of Blood Priests arises and begins to pursue its own path to power, the Dominion can’t let its defeat stand. It must crush the heretics and expel them from the land it has claimed. Fortunately, Lewis Cayce is a professional. He understands defense can only result in a stalemate at best, and a stalemate with the more populous Dominion will only lead to defeat in the end. The lucky few will be enslaved. The rest will be sacrificed in the most horrific way imaginable. The only hope his new allies have is to win—and to do that, his little army must attack the most powerful and diabolical enemy on the planet in its own territory. Achieving victory will take all Lewis’s imagination, the courage and trust of his soldiers—and all the round shot and canister his tiny band of artillerymen can slam out. Leseprobe Chapter 1 November 1847 1st Division Nautla Yucatán Peninsula The sun stood bright and hot over the "ruined" city of Nautla on the west coast of the Yucatán, which was being hacked back out of the dense surrounding forest even while other labor was under way to reclaim it. Like the larger, even more ancient Campeche to the south, it boasted finely fitted stone walls around impressive dwellings and other structures, as well as the seemingly ubiquitous central stepped pyramid that appeared to grace every city of any size in the region. Unlike distant Campeche, however, Nautla's condition wasn't a result of centuries of neglect. Right on the edge of the Contested Lands, or "La Tierra de Sangre," largely controlled by Holcano Indians and furry-feathery, extremely ferocious, "Grik-like" beings (these struck most as a terrifying cross between vultures and alligators with their upright physiques, raptor claws, and toothy jaws), Nautla had received too much attention over the last several decades. First conquered by Holcanos about fifty years earlier, it became almost a traditional battlefield for Holcanos and Ocelomeh Jaguar Warriors to trade back and forth. The Ocelomeh were never as numerous and used imaginative tactics, especially after the arrival of Har-Kaaska and his Mi-Anakka (vaguely catlike folk from an unnamed land shipwrecked there twenty years before). They finally made a serious attempt to permanently liberate the city a decade ago, but never induced enough people to return and make it prosper. They gave up. It had "belonged" to the Holcanos ever since, though its only real inhabitants were bands of wild "garaaches," essentially young feral Grik that hadn't joined a tribe. They were a menace to everyone, even their own species, and Grik and Holcanos both hunted and ate them. Despite years of fighting in and around Nautla, the combatants hadn't possessed the means to seriously damage its durable structures, and it remained largely intact. Troops under the command of the Blood Cardinal Don Frutos of the "Holy Dominion"-a power based on a warped mix of centuries-old Spanish Catholic Christianity and Mayan-Aztecan blood ritual, dominating most of what should've been Mexico and Central America and bent on conquest and subjugation-had briefly bombarded it when they passed through. They'd only been exe...
