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

nebula.

The enemy was waiting for the Third Ship behind Mars, and the ferocity of their
assault was visible even at that distance. So great was the weight of
destruction thrust upon her that the cone of a Lunar shadow was traced on the
dust of her prior engagements.

But while the Third Ship was dying, the smallest of the fleet, the Fourth Ship
carrying only two hundred thousand people from North Africa, abruptly left its
building field at Tobruk, accelerated over the Mediterranean west of Malta, and
then ascended into a dangerously low, nearly atmospheric orbit. At the moment
the attack was initiated against her larger sister, her Captain unfolded the
first quantum dimension and brought her up and then out at fight angles to the
ecliptic, up toward Polaris and away from the plane of the galaxy.

"We have to go," I told my superiors as soon as I realized they might succeed.

I was instructed to wait, that rather than being thrown into disarray, the enemy
had only been alerted and they would cover every possible avenue of escape.
Unlike any of her sisters, the Sixth Ship was constructed underground, and the
enemy would not detect her underneath the vacant prairie lands west of Kearney,
Nebraska. We could afford to wait.

It was impossible, I pleaded. Our own ground penetration radar could detect
something as massive as the Ship. And the enemy must eventually notice how the
city had grown in the past five years, how ground and air traffic to it had
increased so. The miracle was that the city had not already had enemy assassins
quietly working their way through its population, let alone received a
gratuitous half-megaton.

They relented and the Ship was prepared. A month was needed, during which the
grasses died around Kearney. I thought that the clouds of topsoil that the wind
lifted up from the barren Earth would hide the Sixth Ship's hiding place.
Studies by my people also showed that the static electricity generated by such
dust storms would blind the enemy's sensors.

The plains were an autumnal desert by the time we were ready. Bates, a
geologist, was in the car with me. The iron-colored city passed on the north
side of the perimeter highway. He had been talking about how he was looking
forward to leaving and going to sleep for several objective centuries while I
was unfolding and folding quantum dimensions as if they were origami. Then he
suddenly asked, "Killed the dog yet?"

"Excuse me?" I didn't have one.
He was a reasonably good friend, but still looked embarrassed, as if he had
affronted my rank. "You know. Killed the dog. Sold the house or paid up the
insurance." He spun his right hand up in the air as if to conjure something out
of it. "Uh, done whatever you have to do to clean up your affairs here and
leave. Forever."