"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 15 - Grimmer Than Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Bill Fawcett sold the Battlestation shared universe with me as co-editor. I'd been doing a lot of work in
shared universes by that time, and I decided that the two volumes of the original contract would be my
last for a while. I wrote my two stories, "Facing the Enemy" and "Failure Mode," so that they'd give
closure to the series. You don't ordinarily get that with life, but it's something I strive for in fiction.

And that brings me very directly to the six stories which open this volume. They come from a slightly
earlier shared universe that Bill developed and I co-edited: The Fleet. They follow a special operations
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company in a future war against aliens. (Parenthetically, most of my Military SF doesn't involve aliens;
possibly because I don't recall ever being shot at by an alien when I was in Viet Nam or Cambodia.)
Each story is self-standing but they have a cumulative effect and are, I believe, some of the best Military
SF I've written.

What the Fleet storiesdon't have is closure; that too, I think, has something to do with me and Southeast
Asia. The series ended and I thought I'd walked away from it, just as I thought I'd walked away from a
lot of other things back in 1971.

Then, years later, I wroteRedliners , a novel about a special operations company fighting aliens until
things went badly wrong . . . except that inRedliners they got a second chance. Theyand their society
got a second chance. They got closure, and in a funny way so did I. SinceRedliners I've been able to
write adventure fiction that's a little less cynical, a little less bleak, than what I'd invariably done in the past
when I wrote action stories.

I don't think I'd have been able to writeRedliners if I hadn't previously written the Fleet stories. I'm
awfully glad I did write them.

Dave Drake
david-drake.com




RESCUE MISSION
A Story of The Fleet
"Is it true," demanded one of the First Platoon corporals in a voice that filled the echoing bay of the
landing craft, "that this whole operation is so we can rescue Admiral Mayne's nephew from the
Khalians?"

Captain Kowacs looked at the man. The corporal stared back at the company commander with a jaunty
arrogance that said,Whatcha gonna do? Put me on point?

Which of course was the corporal's normal patrolposition.

Kowacs took a deep breath, but you learned real fast in a Marine Reaction Company that you couldn't
scare your troops with rear-echelon discipline. Trying to do that would guarantee you were the first