"Stephen Goldin - The Eternity Brigade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

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The Eternity Brigade by
Stephen Goldin
Prelude
Hawker knew war in all its perverse permutations. He knew the killing
and the pain. He knew the endless waiting in darkness for the enemy
attack to begin, that helpless frustration when his fate was in the hands of
others. He knew the swift battles, with quiet death and meaningless
destruction flaring all around him. He knew the quiet and the noise, the
calm and the panic. He knew the hatred for the enemy, the scorn for his
own superiors, the mystical friendship for his comrades-in-arms. He'd
faced the paradoxes of combat and hacked his way through the overgrown
jungle of its eternal contradictious.

He was a master at the fine art of mass killing. His original training in
slaughter had been on members of his own race, but he had long ago
broadened his education, to the point where he could kill any intelligent
creature his superiors told him was an enemy. Numbers were
insignificant; he could kill thousands at the impersonal touch of a button
or execute an opposing sentry with his bare hands. Means and motives
were immaterial. His superiors had molded him into what they hoped was
the best fighting machine possible. Just point him in the right direction
and let him do his job.

If Hawker had any opinions of this, his superiors had long ago stopped
asking him what they were. He was a creature living solely for war; he had
no other purpose. No one knew this better than Hawker himself. There
might be peace when he closed his eyes, but there would be fighting when
he opened them again.

This occasion seemed little different from the countless others that had
preceded it. There were bright lights and noises; Hawker could tell that
even with his eyes closed. The ground shook with the force of explosions,
but they were either mild or far away. There was no immediate threat, but
the situation could not be good.

He prepared himself for the training probe, that sharp mental stab into
his mind which, in a fraction of a second, could implant all the
background material he'd need to comprehend the current situation. He
knew from past experience that the information would flash through his
brain in an instant, the mental equivalent of playing a tape recorder back
at far greater than normal speed. When the probe was gone, he would be
dizzy for a moment, and then anything he needed to know about the