"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers - Counting the Cost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

"But more important..." Desoix went on with a nod of approval to Blaney. "Never site a gun in a spot where you can't drive away if things really get bad. Do you expect to ride down in the elevators if a mob decides what they really ought to do tomorrow is burn the hospital?"

"Well, they wouldn't..." Karsov began.

He looked at the wreckage and smoke near the plaza stairs and thought the better of saying what a mob would or wouldn't do.

"Were you on Shinano, Sergeant?" Desoix asked Blaney.

"Yessir," the non-com said. "But I wasn't in the city during the riots, if that's what you mean."

"I was a gun captain then," Desoix said with a smile and a lilting voice, because it was always nice to remember the ones you survived. "The Battery Commander - this was Gilt, and they sacked him for it - sited us on top of the Admin Building. Ten stories in a central park.

"So we had a really good view of the mob, because parts of it were coming down all five radial streets with torches. And they'd blown up the transformer station providing power to the whole center of town.

He coughed and rubbed his face. "There were air cars flying every which way, carrying businessmen who knew they weren't going to get out at ground level... but we didn't have a car, and we couldn't even get the blazes off the roof. It didn't have a staircase, just the elevator - and that quit when the power went off."

Blaney was nodding with grim agreement; so were two of the other veterans in the gun crew.

"How - how'd you get out, sir?" Karsov asked in a suitably chastened tone.

Desoix grinned again. It wasn't a pleasant expression. "Called to one of those businessmen on a loud-hailer," he said. "Asked him to come pick us up. When he saw where we had the calliope pointed, he decided that was a good idea."

The slim officer paused and looked up at the House of Grace again. "Getting lucky once doesn't mean I'm going to put any of my men in that particular bucket again, though," he said. "Down here - " he smiled brightly, but there was more than pure humor in this expression too " - at the worst, you've got the gun to keep anybody at a distance."

"Think it's going to be that bad, sir?" one of the crewmen asked.

Desoix shrugged. "I need to report to the Palace," he said. "I guess it's clear enough to do that now."

As he turned to walk away from the gun position, he heard Sergeant Blaney saying, "Not for us and the other meres, maybe. But yeah, it's going to get that bad here. You wait and see."

_CHAPTER FOUR

Tyl Koopman strolled through a series of the short aisles into which the plaza was marked by freshly-erected kiosks. In most cases the shop proprietors were still setting out their goods, but they were willing to call Tyl over to look at their merchandise. He smiled and walked on - the smile becoming fixed in short order.

He'd learned Spanish when the Slammers were stationed on Cartagena three years before, so he could have followed the local language without difficulty. It was interesting that most of the shopkeepers recognized Tyl's uniform and spoke to him in Dutch, fluent at least for a few words of enticement.

It was interesting also that many of those keeping shops in the plaza were of Levantine extraction, like the merchants who had disembarked from the surface-effect freighter. They were noticeable not only for their darker complexions but also because their booths and clothing were so bedecked with crosses that sometimes the color of the underlying fabric was doubtful.

Not, as Lieutenant Desoix had suggested, that their desperate attempts to belong to the majority would matter a hoot in Hell when the Crusade really got moving. Tyl wasn't a cynic. Like most line mercenaries, he wasn't enough of an intellectual to have abstract positions about men and politics.

But he had a good mind and plenty of data about the way things went when politicians hired men to kill for them.

The section Tyl was walking through was given over to tobacco and smoking products - shops for visitors rather than staples for the domestic market which seemed to Bll most of the plaza.

Tobacco from Bamberia had a smooth melding of flavors that remained after the raw leaf was processed into the cold inhalers in which most of the galaxy used imported tobacco. Those who couldn't afford imports smoked what they grew in local plots on a thousand worlds... but those who could afford the best and wanted the creosote removed before they put the remainder of the taste into their bodies, bought from Bamberia.

Most of the processing was done off-planet, frequently on the user world where additional flavorings were added to the inhalers to meet local tastes. There were a few inhaler factories on the outskirts of Bamberg City, almost the only manufacturing in a metropolis whose wealth was based on transport and government. Their creations were displayed on the tables in the plaza, brightlycolored plastic tubes whose shapes counterfeited everything from cigarillos to cigars big enough to pass for riot batons.

But the local populace tended to follow traditional methods of using the herb that made them rich. Products for the local market posed here as exotica for the tourists and spacers who wanted something to show the folks back home where they'd been.