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

The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles
behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the
collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had
smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.
That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone limped back alone. Its data were
analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists' ship had been pursued by another vessel and
destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since "Aldebaranian" is
a little hard to handle, they named the enemy "Tauran."
Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went
out alone, and finally the Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF,
THE FOREVER WAR 9

United Nations Exploratory Force. Emphasis on the

Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of
footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite
Conscription Act of 1996 and the most cutely conscripted army in the history of warfare.
So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and
strength, slogging cutely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the
usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional
standing pool of liquid helium.
3
About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon.
Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.
The troopship was a converted "cattlewagon" made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted
bushes and beasts. Don't think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us.
Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.
The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half.
Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one-twentieth of the speed of light-
not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.
Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal.. . it's no picnic. We did some
cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got
several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from
littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking
and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got
so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open
air.
I'd been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free
fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on
the moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after
them, floating through the quarters with sponges and inspirators to suck up the globules of partly-
digested
10
'[HE FOREVER WAR
11
"Concentrate, High-protein, Low-residue, Beef Flavor
(Soya)."
We had a good view of Charon, coming down from orbit. There wasn't much to see, though. It was
just a dim, off-white sphere with a few smudges on it. We landed about two hundred meters from the