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

Something blew a sullen smoke ring from the Spook-held woods. The fighting had lit several fires. One of them had reached a case of ammunition or grenades.
Farrell looked over his shoulder. Dust and varicolored smoke rose from beyond the warehouses. Some of the buildings were burning also. Farrell's eyes didn't see any strikers that his visor's location chart had missed.
"For Chrissake come on, sir!" Leinsdorf snarled. He gripped Farrell's shoulder and slid him off the APC by main force. Farrell had stopped to provide cover while his strikers withdrew, so he and Leinsdorf still had a hundred yards to run to the boat.
The coil guns in the pickup boat's two lateral blisters raked the Spook positions. The weapons worked by the same principle as stingers but flung half-ounce projectiles. Trees shattered and rock outcrops disintegrated into sparks and lethal fragments.
Salvos of three or four shells each dived on the boat at intervals of a few seconds. Most of the rounds blew up in midair. Clouds of dirty black smoke spread above the vessel. The point defense system cycled flechettes so fast that the mechanisms screamed like saws instead of crackling.
Two of the Spook rounds hit the ground west of the boat. A striker went down; a buddy helped him to his feet. Because the missiles had been badly aimed, the defense system hadn't bothered to engage them. The software targeted only threats to the vessel itself.
Pain crackled along the right side of Farrell's chest. He flipped his visor up so that he could breathe without the constriction of the helmet filters. He should have switched to his oxygen bottle instead. The atmosphere was hot and metallic, sharp with ozone. His legs moved like wooden stumps.
The pickup boat was ten yards away. Strikers in the open bay fired toward the Spook infantry. Abbado and Glasebrook helped the hard-suited striker climb the high step and flop forward on the deck.
Nadia Broz was waiting at the flank of the ship. "Come on!" she screamed. The pilot blipped his air pumps. The thruster inlets honked air and a burp of iridescent plasma seared the ground.
"Go!" Farrell shouted to the pilot on the ground-to-air channel. He turned his head for one last check on any of his people who might be staggering toward pickup without the helmet that ID'd strikers on the locator circuitry. More shells were shrieking down.
Leinsdorf and Broz each grabbed an arm and together hurled their commanding officer aboard the pickup boat. An intense red flash silhouetted them and flung them after Farrell. A shell had landed just short of the vessel.
The boat lifted. The hatches were already closing.
"Medic!" Farrell shouted. He tried to sit up against the weight of Leinsdorf's torso. "Medic!"
The strikers' body armor had performed very well, but there was almost nothing left of either Leinsdorf or Broz below the waist.
"Medic, for the love of God!"

Interlude: Earth
My aide entered the office as I studied the holographic starscape filling the back wall. "I will be retiring soon, Miss Chun," I said.
When I was aide to Chief of Administration Singh thirty-seven years ago, she always called me "Mr. Smith." I have held many positions in the Unity bureaucracy since that time, but my first supervisor marked me more than I realized until I became Chief myself.
"You have several years left, sir," Chun said. She glanced at the starscape. It was a raw blaze of color against blackness, all the stars within the volume the Unity called human space; whether or not the stars had planets, whether or not those planets had life, whether or not there was a permanent human presence in the system.
"I was thinking of Stalleybrass, Miss Chun," I said with a smile. Her implant would have told her if I had careted one of the stars on the display, but even a biocomputer as sophisticated as a Category 4 civil servant cannot read minds.
"Not the choice I would have expected, sir," she said, perfectly deadpan though she knew there must be a joke of sorts somewhere in my statement.
Miss Chun was not afraid of me, but she knew that if I ordered the guards outside to kill her, they would obey me without hesitation. Implants do not rob us Category 4's of personality, but the .8 probability was that Miss Chun would commit suicide if I ordered her to do so. Any decision I made would be, must be, for the benefit of mankind.
"The learning curve ensures there will be a dip in the performance of this office when Ivanovitch replaces me as Chief," I said. "Better that the change not occur in two years, after age and stress have made noticeable degradation in my abilities. The Kalendru leave us very little margin."
Instead of repeating her comment about Stalleybrass, Miss Chun looked again at the starscape.
Stalleybrass is a fleet base. It has a permanent cadre of fifty thousand and a transient population of up to three times that number. Those civilians on the planet are as directly concerned with the war effort as the military personnel who outnumber them.
There are plants and shellfish in the seas of Stalleybrass, but the continents are wastes of sand with no indigenous life except lichen. Existence on Stalleybrass is viewed as a penance by all the humans stationed there.
I have been thinking a great deal about penance since I made my decision to retire.
"Not for myself directly," I said. "The Maxus 377 expeditionary force has returned to Stalleybrass."
Chun nodded grimly. "An expensive bit of bad luck for us," she said, "but not nearly as expensive as it would have been if the Kalendru fleet had arrived immediately after our landing instead of immediately before. There would have been tens of thousands of casualties among troops on the ground while Admiral Gage fought off the enemy-if he in fact was able to do that. If the Kalendru had pushed Gage out of the system, the entire landing force would have been lost."
"A .2 probability," I agreed. "Instead we lost only twenty-six personnel."
"Deaths as a result of enemy action," Miss Chun said in the interests of precision. "There were a hundred and five accidental fatalities during the voyage and return, though of course the serious costs were logistical."
"The serious costs to the Unity were logistical," I said, precise in turn. "And our duty is to the Unity. But Miss Chun-have you considered the problem of reintegrating former combat personnel into civilian society?"
Miss Chun stiffened almost imperceptibly. She was wondering if my mental condition hadn't deteriorated abruptly after all. "I'm aware that the problem exists, sir," she said. "It appears to me as inevitable as the danger posed by lightning storms. Neither threatens society as a whole because of the relative rarity of the event."
"They aren't criminals in the normal sense," I said. "The likelihood of a former combat soldier violating laws for the sake of gain is significantly lower than that of a non-veteran doing the same thing. The risk is that they may react with extreme violence to social constraints on their behavior."
Miss Chun walked to her console in the corner. Even with an implant the amount of information one can absorb is limited. Until now Miss Chun had scanned only a summarized report on the Maxus 377 expeditionary force. She called up the full data, from inception to the present.
I had viewed the same file a few minutes before she entered the office.

Interlude: Stalleybrass
Because the driver was afraid of getting into trouble, the surface-effect truck slowed only to about twenty miles an hour. Abbado and his strikers had inserted from vehicles moving a lot faster than that. They unassed from the right-side cargo door, the side opposite the enlisted personnel club, and landed without even bothering to roll.
Methie stumbled because the leg burned at Active Cloak hadn't fully healed on the voyage back. Glasebrook kept him from tumbling.
The driver accelerated, leaving a wake of dust stirred from the barren landscape by the truck's stub wings. He'd tried to argue 3-3 out of hiding in the back as he deadheaded to the port, but he'd given in when Abbado insisted. The driver's kid brother had been a striker in B-4 before he was killed.
"All present and accounted for, Sarge," Horgen said. Abbado waited till the pall of fine red powder had settled a little, then tugged down the kerchief he'd tied over his nose and mouth to filter some of the solids out of the local atmosphere.
Abbado didn't want them to look as though they'd come to stick the place up. They just wanted a beer or two-dozen. He and his six strikers sauntered in line abreast across the "street," a hundred-foot channel between buildings. There wasn't a lot of traffic, but twice they had to wait for a vehicle to pass in the other direction.
The club had been converted from a warehouse like those to either side of it. The unit insignia painted over the door was too dusty to be legible. A Sergeant 4th Class watched through a clear window as 3-3 approached. He looked pissy.
Abbado didn't blame the locals for being in a bad mood. Glasebrook must have been thinking the same thing because he said, "You know, I think I'd eat my gun before I'd let them stick me here in the permanent garrison."
The doorman was in his late thirties, ten years older than Abbado. He wore a dove-gray rear echelon fatigue uniform that was so clean he must have changed into it after he entered the club. Nothing could exist in the open on Stalleybrass without getting a coating of dust.
"Good afternoon, Sergeant," Abbado said. He was a Sgt3 himself, and the one-step difference in rank made no matter off-duty. "What's the beer like on Stalleybrass?"
He pulled at the doorhandle. The door didn't open.
"You're barbs from the fleet, right?" the garrison soldier called through the panel. "Anyway, you're out of uniform for this club. Better get your asses gone before the Shore Police show up to ask what you're doing out of your compound."