"Mark S. Geston - The Allies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Geston Mark S)

MARK S. GESTON

THE ALLIES

I was to have been the Captain of the First Ship, but she was destroyed before
completion. I was on my way to the building yard in Kazakstan and watched on my
transport's situation boards. The saturation attack squandered formations of
surface darts, hypersonic cruisers and sub-orbitals with a profligacy unusual
for the enemy. Their weapons were always well shielded and at least one out of
any five would have gotten through the Ship's defensive hemisphere with their
usual tactical approaches. But eighty-nine weapons were sent against her, each
with a standard half megaton charge. Forty-one reached the yard's perimeter, of
these, fourteen were neutralized by the perfectly simultaneous detonation of the
first twenty-seven.

The effect was devastating, even against such a vast target. The central blast
crater was almost a kilometer wide and a hundred meters deep. The surface of the
Earth was smelted into green glass for a radius of eight kilometers from it. The
relief column from Baku found nothing alive more complex than bacteria when it
arrived three days later.

It had become obvious how greatly they prized our world and everything on it but
us by the fifth year of our conflict. Their weapons were normally used with
economy and dismaying accuracy so that nothing but humankind and our works were
destroyed. Fusion weapons were directed against the great cities, but never
where their shock waves would escape built-up areas. That was thought to have
been why New York was never bombed, out of concern for the green expanse of
Central Park. Surface darts were sent to cut all the bridges, pipelines and
cables, and fly down the entrances to the river tunnels. The city was
effectively besieged and starved into submission m a month.

In the towns and villages that could not be attacked by fusion devices without
harming the surrounding countryside, the enemy's agents would appear in small
groups or as lone assassins and patiently liquidate everyone who lived there.
The rest of us, on our side of the front, listened on the net and heard the
people drop away, one by one, even if there were thousands in the distant valley
and tile process took months. The carrier waves remained, linking us to the
dead, until the enemy removed the solar panels and took the translator stations
down from the mountain tops.

Reconnaissance showed the Earth flourishing where we had been driven out and the
enemy's rule was absolute. The ruins of cities and towns were swept away,
granulated and spread across the open spaces to become topsoil or atmospheric
dust. (How we remembered the sunsets of those bitter years!) The roads were torn
up, the bridges and dams removed, and our ground reseeded with buffalo grass,
redwood and oak. Their desert reclaimed the Suez Canal, and the jungle erased
the Panama Canal.
The animals returned. Censuses were easy over the infrared band; they left many
of the general survey satellites alone as if they wanted us to see what was
happening. There were herds of fallow deer in the Bols de Boulogne four years