"Joe Haldeman - The Forever War (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"Slow and easy now. You've got five minutes."
"Y-yeah. Five." Her footsteps started out slow and regLilar. Then, after she started climbing the
side, the sounds were less regular, maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go- "Shit" A
loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.
"Shit-shit."
THE FOREVER WAR
25
"What's wrong, private?"
"Oh, shit." Silence. "Shit!"
"Private, you don't wanna get shot, you tell me what's wrong!"
"I. . . shit, I'm stuck. Fucken rockslide. . . shit. . . . DO SOMETHiNG! I can't move, shit I
can't move I, I-"
"Shut up! How deep?"
"Can't move my, shit, my fucken legs. HELP ME-"
"Then goddainmit use your arms-push! You can move a ton with each hand." Three minutes.
She stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting,
and you could hear rocks tumbling away.
"I'm free." Two minutes.
"Go as fast as you can." Cortez's voice was fiat, emotionless.
At ninety seconds she appeared, crawling over the rim.
"Run, girl. . . . You better run." She ran five or six steps
md fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again- It looked as
though she was going pretty fast, but she
had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, "All tight, Bovanovitch, get down on your
stomach and lie still." Ten seconds, but she didn't hear or she wanted to get just a little more
distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides, and at the high point of one leap there
was a flash and a rumble, and something big hit her below the neck, and her headless body spun off
end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled
gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks
to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.
That night Cortez didn't lecture us, didn't even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite
to each other and nobody was afraid to talk about it..
I sacked with Rogers-everybody sacked with a good friend-but all she wanted to do was cry, and she
cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.
7
"Fire team A-move out!" The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It
was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty
fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days' experience we
weren't ready to do more than an easy jog.
I carried a grenade launcher loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their
laser-fingers set at a point oh eight dee one, not much more than a flashlight. This was a
simulated attack-the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to use once and be thrown away.
"Team B, follow. Team leaders, take over."
We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said,
"Stop and cover." We clustered behind the rocks and waited for Team B.
Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men find women whispered by us. As soon as they
were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.
"Fire!" Red circles of light danced a half-klick downrange, where the bunker was just visible.
Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined
the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a forty-five degree angle and popped off a