"Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

"And all of that schooling was for nothing."
"You made cum laude but not summa cum laude. After graduation, you managed to
totally defeat the enemy, but the man who is our current commanding general
accomplished much the same thing as you did without losing a single man, and without
killing a single enemy soldier or civilian. Furthermore, he captured all of their equipment
without having to destroy any of it. I can get you a recording of what he did if you want
to see it."
"Huh. Maybe later. So who was this guy, anyway?" I said, getting a bit interested.
"You haven't met him, though perhaps I can get you an introduction to do so. He is a
Pole with a bit of Kashubian blood in him. His name is Jan Sobieski."
"Not the ancient King Jan Sobieski, of course," I said. "Again, maybe later. So, what
happened to my classmates, my supposed colonels? Besides Kasia, I mean. They were
real, weren't they?"
"They were all biological humans, and they all have made tanker first. In the unlikely
event that you ever do get promoted to general, they will make colonel."
"Yeah, best to keep the team together. But aside from Kasia, all of them were
Croatians, not Kashubians. How did that happen?"
"They really were captured by the Serbians, during the first attack of the war. The
Serbians really did load them involuntarily into Serbian tanks. Once we took command of
both sides, we were going to repatriate them, but your colonels were among those who
volunteered to stay in the army. The timing was right and their qualifications were good,
so their training was incorporated into your training program."
"Huh. One other thing. What really happened to Neto Kondo? I never did buy that
crap about his 'emotional unsuitability.' Neto was a fine, intelligent, and stable man."
"He went permanently insane, Mickolai. His tank's computer crashed when he was
tunneling a road under the biggest ocean on New Yugoslavia. It was a week before he
could be retrieved, and while his tank's subsystems kept him physically alive, he was
done in by a combination of claustrophobia and stimulus deprivation. An unfortunate
accident."
"Tunneling a road underneath an ocean? What the hell for?"
"That's what we've really been doing here on New Yugoslavia. We've been working
on an engineering project. After all, while you were lying in my coffin being trained, it
was only reasonable that the tank should be put to one of its many other uses."
"An engineering project. Shit. Neto was a good man. All that character, brilliance,
and schooling gone to waste," I said.
"True. Even a construction project is not without its casualties. Still, wasn't the school
enjoyable for its own sake?"
"I suppose it was, and what the heck, it was only two months, in the real world."
"I'm afraid not, Mickolai. You see, you spent the time in me, not in a real Combat
Control Computer. I don't have the capability of keeping you in Dream World at combat
speed, running at fifty times normal speed."
"You're telling me that eight years has gone by?"
"No. I was upgraded a few months ago with the diamond semiconductors that are
now available. I can now handle Dream World about thirty times faster than I could
before."
So the breakthrough in semiconductors had finally happened! For two hundred years,
something better than silicon was always supposed to be right around the corner, be it
organic semiconductors, or molecular switches, or even nanotubes, and always silicon
technology improved just enough to be superior. It was much like the way that people in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries kept expecting something better than a piston