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

without it, well, in the old days, when a combat plane drilled in, the pilot was driven into
his boots so hard that they exploded.
Mirko stood there next to Frenchy, and we waited for help to arrive.
The recruit who had been killed was Bogdan Miskovich. I'd liked him, too.
Actually, our losses were far lower than I had expected them to be, when I had been
given this mission. They used to call the first wave on a frontal attack The Forlorn Hope.
We had been very lucky.
 CHAPTER ONE

A Very Rude Awakening
Kasia, my beautiful new wife, and I had ridden our posh, new air car back from the
architect's office, where we had just approved the final design of our magnificent new
mansion. It was to be built on the six thousand hectaresтАФsixty square kilometers!тАФof
rich farming and ranching land that had been given to us by the grateful government of
New Croatia, for our services in their recent war with New Serbia.
New Yugoslavia was the absolutely best place in Human Space for agriculture. It was
a young planet, half the age of Earth. Its native plants and animals were primitive, and
simply could not compete with those from my home planet. It wasn't that our life forms
would devour theirs. They couldn't.
The proteins used by each sort were completely unusable by the other. Our diseases
couldn't bother their life forms, nor could theirs bother ours. But both sorts of plants
needed the same sunlight, water, and minerals, and ours were simply much better at
putting those things together. It was like a Little League team trying to compete in the
Majors, just no contest at all.
And the powerful Planetary Ecological Council knew it. They saw their task not as
one of building a balanced, Earth-type ecology on their new planet, but of building a very
imbalanced one. An ecology tilted way in the favor of human beings. They used their
vast authority to keep out weeds, diseases, and everything else that they felt might be in
any way undesirable. On the rare occasions when something unauthorized slipped past
their tight quarantines, they ruthlessly stamped it out.
On Earth, insects ate between twenty and eighty percent of all vegetation, including
the plants we humans needed to live on. On New Yugoslavia, there were no insects,
except for one strain of Australian stingless bee that was needed for pollination. A debate
had been going on for years about bringing in a few sorts of butterflies, simply for their
beauty, but it probably wouldn't be settled for a long time yet.
The result was that a hectare of land on this planet produced three times the crops, on
the average, as a hectare on Earth, and at far lower cost. Herbicides and insecticides
weren't needed. There were no Earth weeds, and if a native plant needed anything that a
nearby Earth plant wanted, the native shriveled and died. In many instances, even
plowing was unnecessary. You just seeded and harvested.
 New Yugoslavia was fast becoming the bread basket of the universe.
And my wife and I owned a vast tract of it!
We had also been given a lifetime immunity from all taxes, permission to exchange
our New Kashubian passports for New Croatian ones anytime we wanted to, and the
generous retirement pay due to both a general and a colonel, between us.
On the way home, Kasia suggested that we spend the night in Dream World, which
meant spending the night physically in our tanks.
The New Croatian and New Kashubian governments had permitted us to retain, for
our personal use, two of the thirty thousand intelligent Mark XIX Main Battle Tanks that
we had captured for them from the Serbs.