"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 2 - Cross The Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

"There's the matter of responsibility to your passengers, too, Levine," Slade said. He walked over to the bulb of the navigational display which was now dark and empty. It looked like a harmless motion, because Slade's back was to four of the Guards; but everyone on the bridge was now within reach of the tanker's arms. "There's three hundred of us who've paid to be hauled home on schedule and in order, right?"
"Happens the rest of us," said Blackledge, "want to change the schedule a little, Slade. Look-" his voice rose in nervous anger, though Blackledge was not a small man either- "it's fine for you, the fares pay the cost of Transit and the ship makes its profit off odds and sods of cargo it picks up on the way. But there's a lot of us aboard, your highness, people who spent their last sparkler to cheat the hangman one more time. You get off and transfer a fortune back into your pocket. But what d'ye think happens to most of us?"
Slade turned slowly to face the outlaw leader. Well, he'd never really believed he was meant to die in bed, for all his determination a month ago that he would go home and live as quietly as a shore-side mussel.
Blackledge's face was suffused. In that state it was marred by a scattering of white, hair-thin scars. "I don't suppose," said Slade in a reasonable voice, "that you called me here to see if I'd split my pay-" he had more than that, but less than the fortune in loot that Aylmer's Guards would have expected from someone with Slade's opportunities- "with everybody at our first landfall."
If Blackledge said they did intend such extortion, it was going to get tense. Slade doubted that these blue-haired clowns had the subtlety that would be needed to actually break Slade to their will; but he did not care to be around for them to practice on, either.
"Naw, we don't want your money," the outlaw said. Slade relaxed, and the outlaws relaxed. The ship's crewmen looked quizzical, but they did not realize how close they had been to a maelstrom of bodies and gunfire. Blackledge was trying to find an alternative to the bantering superiority with which he had opened the interview and to the frightened hostility into which his tones had degenerated. "We're all mercs, right? We don't rob each other."
Which was a lie, but one whose telling was an olive branch that Don Slade was willing to accept with a smile. "There's a lot of us, you see," the outlaw continued, "who didn't figure on Hammer getting holier than thou once he'd shot his way into the presidency. We figure we're owed something, and there's plenty of places out there just waiting to pay us."
Places like Tethys, Slade thought as he nodded false approval. Places that hadn't had an internal war since they were settled. Places whose emergency alert system was cob-webbed from disuse. The chances of this lot getting away with significant loot were slim, but Via! the damage they'd do before the locals mopped them up!
Via. . . . If Slade grabbed the submachine gun of the nearest outlaw, he could empty it into the control panel before they stopped him. "I don't know, though," the big man said as if he were considering. "Three hundred effectives won't give you much of a perimeter. I suppose everybody's pretty well agreed on this, though?"
Another man with scarcely a stubble to dye nodded furiously. It was Blackledge, however, who answered by saying, "This is just one ship of twenty-two, Slade. Isn't that right?"
"That's right," agreed Captain Levine with a bob of his head. "Ready and waiting. It's hard to make it on unscheduled loads, stony hard. I owe it to my backers to take a chance when it offers. . . ."
A chance to be slagged down with your rusty hull, the tanker thought. But he was accustomed to the ravening bite of powerguns, and to the short shrift they gave any but the most refractory armor. Levine did not have that experience; and the outlaws, who probably did understand, would not dwell aloud on the vulnerability of the chariots hauling them to fantasy loot.
But it meant that whether or not GAC 59 survived, the raids were going to occur. Good soldiers have to be willing to die, but suicidal men have little purpose in a well-run army. They just leave you with another damned slot to train for. "Sounds like you've thought things through pretty well," said Don Slade. "Now I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop, hey?"
"We want you to command us," said Blackledge. He vomited out the words with a forward thrust of his head. The outlaw's hair waved above his scarred, red face.
Slade was genuinely surprised for the first time since he stepped onto the bridge. He jerked away from the words.
"Look, I don't mean we'd make you God," Blackledge continued hastily. He gestured toward Slade with his left hand. "There's a Ship's Meeting, same as there's a Fleet Meeting. You won't have cop to do with that, it's us that plan things. But after we hit ground, well-" The outlaw frowned across the company of his fellows. "Look, we've heard of you, you're used to commanding things. Most of the other ships, they've got their own officers, they left as formed units. Us here don't. We're bits and pieces from twenty outfits, and nobody the rest'd listen to. We know we're headed for some heavy traffic, Slade. You're going the same place. If you're smart, you'll be willing to help steer for a triple share of the loot."
Slade began playing again with the navigation bulb. It gave him a look of aimless placidity. "Whatever happened to Aylmer?" he asked. "General Aylmer, I think he called himself, didn't he?"
One of Blackledge's companions began to snicker. Blackledge hushed him with a punch on the shoulder and a molten glare. "Aylmer thought he'd make a deal for himself that'd leave some people hanging," said the outlaw leader. "Some people got to know about that. I think they may've greased Aylmer before they bugged out themselves."
A stubble-haired outlaw broke the silence he had maintained until then. "It's the same thing you've been at," he said. His lips flicked saliva. "Only we don't have tanks, is all. And don't worry about what your buddies who stayed on Friesland with the cushy jobs might say. They knew about this. We kept it quiet as we could, but there's no way a deal this big could have been put together without their high and mightinesses learning, was there?"
"All right," said Don Slade. His skin felt as though he were being crushed by an avalanche of needles. But choose Life, even when Life has a gun-stock. "It won't work, because I don't think any of your lot have the discipline to make it work. But I'll give you as much leadership as you're ready to take."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Slade was the first man through the cargo hatch, because there was no one else aboard he had trusted to lead the rush on the gun position. In fact, half a dozen of his thirty-man assault company were pounding across the rammed-earth field as more pirate freighters roared in to land and the personnel of Desireщ Port reached for weapons they had forgotten.
The field was defended by a pair of heavy powerguns on opposite sides of the perimeter. The ball-mounted weapons were hardened, but not to the point that Slade would not have preferred to take them out with bursts from a tribarrel. None of the ships in this rag-tag assemblage would admit to having more than small arms aboard, however.
Levine had landed a full seventy-five meters from the gun Slade was to assault. The chill air and icy footing effectively doubled the distance that was already too long. Shots were being fired, some at random, some in the attack on the control tower that another vessel had been told off for. A bolt ripped a long gouge through the snow near Slade. One of the pirates following the tanker threw away a pistol and began to run back toward the ship.
The door to the gun turret was flush-fitting and locked. One of the pirates fired at it from a meter away. Steel crashed and sprayed. The gunman howled as he danced back. He began swatting at the sparks that had ignited his tousled hair.
"Back, Via!" Slade shouted. The oval gouges in the door surface were bright orange, but the lime core within still glowed white and smooth. Gimbals squealed above the attackers as the gun tube shifted from its vertical alignment. Slade wore a set of back-and-breast armor, too small for him and so joined along the right side with leather straps. The armor prodded him over the collarbone as he slapped the home-made limpet mine over the lock plate of the door. The tanker had a helmet but no commo. He was point-man, not commander, might they all burn in Hell!
The gun fired above them. It was a sharp crack and a cone of heat that fanned across the snow. A pirate freighter, fifty meters up and settling on thrusters, collapsed inward around a cyan flash. The ship hit the field hard enough to bury half of itself before it blew up.
"Fire in the hole!" Slade shouted into the ringing pandemonium. He was unreeling the four meters of wire between the battery pack and the blasting cap in the mine. That length should take him safely around the curve of the gun emplacement. "Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!"
Somebody in the Control Tower blew divots from the concrete to either side of Slade's head. The tanker threw the switch, knowing that if he ducked he would be back in the blast cone. Two of the outlaws who had followed Slade did duck. They were hurled sideways as the mine blew in the door. Slade was through the gap while the smoke still roiled. His submachine gun hosed a long burst as if the bolts were a knotted cord dragging the big man into the gun emplacement.
There were three men in civilian clothes within. One was on his back, unconscious. Two were screaming and frightened, with their hands rising even as the bolts savaged their torsos. . . .

"But after we traded on Desireщ, they decided to touch down on a place called Mandalay," Don Slade said to the Elysian citizens before him.
The castaway's nails were tight against his palms because of his memories of the raid. The initial butchery, and then the savage counter-attack which the locals were able to mount because no one would listen to Slade shouting they should cut and run before Desireщ had time to organize. Looting and raping . . . and then, for many of the outlaws, dying. The universe was better for that result, of course.
"I was against it," Slade's mouth said, "but all I could get was a delay for GAC 59. We held a light-minute out while the rest of the fleet landed."

"This is crazy!" Blackledge cried. He threw up his hands for emphasis. The outlaw was careful to speak toward the commo screen and not toward Don Slade who sat against a bulkhead on the edge of a plotting can. "There's five thousand of us, that's more'n in the whole settlement down there. They're not going to ladle cop on us, even if we weren't allies, like to say."
"The fact they're a bunch of bandits and you-we're a bunch of bandits," said the black-haired tanker, "doesn't make anybody allies. Besides-" He absently fingered the fresh scab on his biceps, a memento of concrete flying during the Desireщ raid. "I could tell you stories about allies."
The main bridge screen was slaved to one of the exterior pick-ups on the flagship. An Awami League hasildar named Al Husad styled himself Fleet Admiral now. He was accepted as such in much the same way that Slade was a captain. Al Husad owed much of his position to hints that his vessel mounted ship-killing guns in one cargo bay. The Admiral had denied that loudly during planning for the Desireщ attack; and Slade's duties had not kept him too busy to see that the flagship landed on Desireщ after both gun emplacements were in pirate hands.
The digital signal feeding the screen was riddled with static. The view of the spaceport and the ships landing with various levels of skill was made pale by the white static flares of individual receptors.
"Curse it, they'll have all the women," moaned one of Blackledge's henchmen, with him on the bridge. The outlaw would have muttered about liquor, but Slade had reprogrammed the waste processor. The unit could now turn out ethanol, diluted by its own hygroscopic tendencies to about 95% but otherwise chemically pure.
"You think they're going to grow shut, Dobler?" Slade gibed. Dobler's blue hair looked particularly silly because it fringed his bald spot. Many of the mercenaries aboard GAC 59 had taken up the Aylmer fashion when they turned pirate. A few had changed back after the raid, though. Seal rings like the one Don Slade wore were having a certain vogue. "I tell you, if any of you had the sense to really listen to me, we'd wait here three days instead of three hours. We'd be the only suckers on Mandalay with money to spend-and you'd be amazed how much cheaper you can go around the world, then."
"What is this cop?" demanded a crackly voice. Mandalay Control was talking again to Al Husad. The weak signal was rebroadcast by the flagship, but the static was amplified as well. "You say twenty-one and there's only twenty."
Service vehicles of some sort were flitting through the field of the vision blocks feeding the screen. Steam and dust drifted from the score of vessels. Anyone who had been present at a landing could imagine besides the hiss and pinging as metal cooled.
"They'll flood the market, though," said Captain Levine dolefully. None of the ex-mercenaries save Slade had an appreciation for the economics of being first to port. "Because you're afraid, we'll get cop for our cargo."
"Nope," said Slade. He had convinced the wrangling leaders of his vessel to go along with the delay. Now, faced with the fact of it, there was a chance that the only consensus left would be to lift the tanker's head. Slade held to his wrist the last of the cache of stim cones he had looted during the raid. "Our cargo's thrusters from the Desireщ repair docks, not jewelry and trash like most of the others loaded. Our price won't go down."
"Had one drop its navigational computer," said Al Husad's voice. "If it don't get on line in a couple days, maybe we'll send help. But say, what about clearance? You come on with all this cop about staying sealed till you clear us, and then you sit on your thumbs. I got boys been in Transit three weeks, ready to tear the roof off this little burg."
"Do you?" replied Mandalay Control. The audio link roared into garbage. The image on the vision screen rocked, but it still showed bombs blowing in the hulls of every ship in sight.
Men with grenade projectors and full atmosphere suits leaped from the beds of the service vehicles which had earlier set the explosives. The grenadiers began firing projectiles into the jagged openings. From the way the Mandalay troops were dressed, Slade was sure they were lobbing gas rounds into the pirate fleet.
"B-b-but God in heaven!" babbled Captain Levine. "They aren't, I mean-Mandalay's a pirate haven, everybody knows that, they trade, they don't-" His circling hand indicated the carnage on the screen.