"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

the vacvan, with a safety margin between them. Of course, if they brought
her down on the plain outside the valley mouth, things were going to get
very hairy; in that case we might be able to lever one or two of the lasers
around to bear, or, failing that, we could try to take the orbot on foot once
it'd landed, with about one chance in eight of making it. But we thought
that they'd land her in the valley; that's where the vacvan had been
parked, and they'd want the shelter of the high mountain walls to conceal
the orbot from any Quaestor eyes that might be around. If so, that gave us
a much better chance. About one out of three.

When the lasers had been positioned, we scattered, four men to an
emplacement, hiding in the camouflaged trenches alongside the big
barrels. Heynith led Goth and me toward the laser we'd placed about fifty
feet up the mountain flank, directly behind and above the vacvan. Ren
stayed behind. He stood next to the vanтАФshoulders characteristically
slouched, thumbs hooked in his belt, face carefully void of expressionтАФand
watched us out of sight. Then he looked out over the valley mouth, hitched
up his gun, spat in the direction of Urheim and climbed up into the van
cab.

The valley was empty again. From our position the vacvan looked like a
shiny toy, sun dogs winking across its surface as it baked in the afternoon
heat. An abandoned toy, lost in high weeds, waiting in loneliness to be
reclaimed by owners who would never come.

Time passed.

The birds we'd frightened away began to settle back onto the hillsides.

I shifted position uneasily, trying half-heartedly to get comfortable.
Heynith glared me into immobility. We were crouched in a trench about
eight feet long and five feet deep, covered by a camouflage tarpaulin
propped open on the valley side by pegs, a couple of inches of vegetation
and topsoil on top of the tarpaulin. Heynith was in the middle, straddling
the operator's saddle of the laser. Goth was on his left, I was on his right.
Heynith was going to man the laser when the time came; it only took one
person. There was nothing for Goth and me to do, would be nothing to do
even during the ambush, except take over the firing in the unlikely event
that Heynith was killed without the shot wiping out all of us, or stand by
to lever the laser around in case that became necessary. Neither was very
likely to happen. No, it was Heynith's show, and we were superfluous and
unoccupied. That was bad.

We had a lot of time to think. That was worse.

I was feeling increasingly numb, like a wall of clear glass had been
slipped between me and the world and was slowly thickening, layer by
layer. With the thickening came an incredible isolation (isolation though I
was cramped and suffocating, though I was jammed up against Heynith's
bunched thighтАФI couldn't touch him, he was miles away) and with the