"David Drake - Fortress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

thirty-seven rockets preceding the attack of a reinforced Druse battalion.

The only physical scar Kelly took home from that one was on his hand, burned by the red-hot receiver
of his rifle as he worked to clear a jam.
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




Another 1985



The three helicopters were orbiting slowly, as if tethered to the monocle ferry on the launchpad five
hundred meters below. When the other birds rotated so that the West Texas sun caught the cameras
aimed from their bays, the long lenses blazed as if they were lasers themselves rather than merely tools
with which to record a test of laser propulsion.

The sheathing which would normally have roofed the passenger compartments of the helicopters had
been removed, leaving the multi-triangulated frame tubing and a view straight upward for the cameras and
the men waiting for what was about to happen on the launchpad.

Sharing the bay of the bird carrying Tom Kelly were a cameraman, a project scientist named Desmond,
and a pair of colonels in Class A uniforms, Army green and Air Force blue, rather than the flight suits that
Kelly thought would have been more reasonable. The military officers seemed to be a good deal more
nervous than the scientist was; and unless Kelly was misreading them, their concern was less about the
test itself than about him - the staff investigator for Representative Carlo Bianci, chairman of the House
Subcommittee on Space Defense. Sometimes it seemed to Kelly that he'd spent all his life surrounded by
people who were worried as hell about what he was going to do next. Occasionally, of course, people
would have been smart to worry more than they did. . . .

The communications helmet Kelly had been issued for the test had a three-position switch beneath the
left earpiece, but only one channel on it was live. He could not hear either the chatter of the Army pilots
in the cockpit or the muttered discussions of the two officers in the passenger bay with him, though the
latter could speak to him when they chose to throw their own helmet switches forward. The clop of the
blades overhead was more a fact than an impediment to normal speech, but the intake rush of the
twin-turbine power plant created an ambiance through which Kelly could hear nothing but what the
officers chose to direct to him through the intercom circuitry.

"Someday," Kelly said aloud, "people are going to learn that the less they try to hide, the less problem
they have explaining things. But I don't expect the notion to take hold in the military any time soon."

"Pardon?" asked Desmond, the first syllable minutely clipped by his voice-activated microphone. The
scientist was Kelly's age or a few years younger, a short-bearded man who slung a pen-caddy from one
side of his belt and a worn-looking calculator from the other. It was probably his normal working garb -
as were the dress uniforms of the public-affairs colonels, flacks of type which Kelly would have found his
natural enemy even if they hadn't been military.

"I'd been meaning to ask you, Dr. Desmond," said Kelly, rubbing from his eyes the prickliness of staring
into the desert of the huge Fort Bliss reservation, "just why. you think the initial field test failed?"