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

darling?" Kasia asked.
"I suppose that it would be, my true love, but you are talking about worthless desert
land that isn't for sale, anyway."
"I'm talking about land that has the finest roads and utilities in the universe! We just
built them, remember? It may be dry now, but a hundred meters below the surface it is
criss-crossed with high-pressure water lines, six meters in diameter! Properly irrigated
desert land is more than twice as productive as ordinary farm land, since the sun is
shining every day. And there are sewage lines down there that will be filled with stuff
that can be processed into first-rate fertilizer! That's if we ever need it. Desert land is
usually pretty fertile as it is."
"Fine. But it isn't for sale!"
"Not to Croatatians, or anybody else from New Yugoslavia. The New Croatian
government deeded it to New Kashubia, as a small part of what they owe us for putting
on their 'war.' After all, once the war is over, they can't let anybody find out what really
happened, can they? The plan is that toward the end of the war, we will start slinging
theoretical nukes at each other, and the battlefields will become permanently radioactive.
That's in addition to all the land mines, vaporized osmium, and other bad things that wars
leave lying around. The whole territory will be permanently off limits to everyone, except
to us Kashubian veterans, who will, in theory, be guarding it for reasons of public safety."
"Why can't somebody just use one of our new highways, and drive in there?" I asked.
"We might be able to maintain a perimeter, but we could never cover every square
kilometer of that large a territory."
"Because all of those new, underground 'Loways' are computer controlled, and we
own the computers. We're calling them that, now, since we can hardly call something
forty meters below ground a 'Highway,' can we?"
"But, if we turn all that area into irrigated farm land, they'll be able to see it from
space."
"When they started this 'war,' they really did shoot down every satellite in orbit, to
keep the wrong people from spying on what was really going on. Nobody goes into space
any more, except for the military, which is us. Everybody else uses transporters from one
planet surface to another."
"After the war is over, surely they'll be putting satellites up again, for
communications, if nothing else."
"Why? Our underground communications net is cheaper, faster, more secure, and will
have ten times more carrying capacity than they will ever need, even if every person on
the planet is in Dream World."
"Weather satellites?"
"They've been getting along just fine for four and a half years using ground stations.
The weather on New Yugoslavia is very predictable, anyway."
"Then they can fly over it."
"That's forbidden because of the radiation danger. If their plane isn't computer
controlled, we'll have to scramble some of our own aircraft and force them down, for
their own good, of course."
"And this will go on forever?" I asked.
"Yep. Meanwhile, we get to buy the land, tax free and cheap."
"How cheap?"
"You wanted the six thousand hectare ranch you thought you had in Dream World?
Well, with half of your back pay, and none of mine, I've found a nice plot that covers
fifteen thousand hectares! That's probably more that we'll ever get under cultivation, but
our grandchildren will appreciate the gesture."