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

creatures on a neglected atmospheric shelf and forgotten them.

The idea of their pastoral glory inhibited our offensive operations. We became
reluctant to use the area weapons that had served so well in the opening phases
of the war. Castle Romeo and Castle Sierra devices could incinerate five
thousand square kilometers with one low air-burst but had an extraordinarily low
radiation signature; they had wiped out the first enemy footholds on Madagascar
and Mindanao. But nothing like that was used after the tenth year. They had
beaten us and brought our inheritance back to life as if in rebuke, and we were
hesitant to destroy it again.

Preparations for departure began even before the secret of stellar flight was
stolen from an enemy cruiser brought down over Wyoming. Half the world was still
left to us then, so there were enough resources to build six immense ships. If
everything went perfectly, we would save ten million people; less than one half
of one percent of the population before the war began.

But the First Ship was destroyed before she was ready, and the same thing
happened to the Fifth Ship at her building yard northwest of Buenos Aires. The
Second Ship had embarked two million crew members and passengers and was
attacked as it accelerated for takeoff across the Sea of Japan and brought down.

At the loss of the First Ship, I was reassigned as Captain of the last, the
Sixth Ship. Since I had been chosen by lottery in the first place, I did not
feel cheated. I would still be responsible for eight hundred thousand people. I
was also secretly relieved that other Captains would go out ahead of me and test
the enemy's defenses and the efficacy of the secret we had stolen from them.
There was also, however, the realization that I would command the last ship to
leave Earth, and this idea sometimes paralyzed me with tragic imaginings. I was
attended by three times the number of psychiatrists and counselors that I had
been before my new posting.

The loss of the Third Ship, which was the largest and most heavily armed of all,
was the most disheartening. It carried four and a third million of the best
people that could be found in Southeast Asia and Oceania away from a field
masterfully hidden in the jungle near Angor War. It attained its parking orbit,
swatted aside the enemy's destroyers with unexpected ease and even wiped out one
of their nightly supply convoys in a display of firepower that lit up the night
sky over central Asia so brightly that minarets in faraway Islamabad cast
shadows.

The Third Ship asked if she should stay to fight the war but she was told to
flee as planned. Perhaps even that short delay had been enough to let the enemy
regroup; it was equally likely that they had not been unprepared at all, and the
Third Ship had just been lucky.
Everyone left behind in the night's hemisphere watched its plasma trail blossom
around it to cover a quarter of the welkin as the first quantum dimensions were
unfolded by its Captain. Immense panels on the Ship's surface moved to harmonize
its shape to the singular reality being constructed to accommodate its passage
through the void, and this made it glitter in the reflected light of its own