"Simon Hawke - Time Wars 01 - The Ivanhoe Gambit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

After the speeches, there was the Parade of Uniforms, a fashion show with something in it for
everyone. The soldiers who modeled the garb of World War I doughboys, Apaches, Belt Commandos
and Prussian cavalry were all good looking and they gave off a robust glow of health and vitality. The
women were all beautiful, but somehow they never got around to explaining just what life was like for
women back in "the good old days." Looking back on it, Lucas didn't believe that any of them had ever
spent so much as one moment in the field. They had probably gone straight out of Official Social
Courtesies directly into the recruiting program.
Following the fashion show, there came the part of the presentation they called Historical Orientation.
It was a brilliant multi-media production complete with stirring music and holographic effects, all about
how history had proved that nations always prospered when they were on a wartime economic standard,
how war was an inevitable fact of human nature and how the advent of time travel had made it possible
to avoid the "inconvenience" of the physical presence of a war in present time. There was a barrage of
information about how international disputes were settled by evaluating the performance of soldiers of the
present in conflicts of the past, a tour de force that looked and sounded very glamorous, even if the
information did flash by so quickly that it was impossible to absorb it all. At the end, there had been a
short speech about how it was possible to apply to the Referee Corps upon completion of your tour of
duty. It was well known that the refs had the highest pay scale in existence and enjoyed a standard of
living on a par with heads of state, to whom, as an extra-national arbitrating body, they did not have to
answer.
However, the fact of the matter was, as Lucas was later to discover, only those scoring in the top five
percent of the S.A.T.s could qualify for the Referee Corps School selection process. Even so, it was still
necessary to achieve degrees in Temporal Physics, Trans-historical Adjustment and Maintenance, and
Econo-political Management and Arbitration. Supposedly, according to scuttlebutt, there wasn't a single
person in the refs under the age of one hundred. There were younger personnel in the Observer Corps,
the lower echelon of that vaunted cadre, but few soldiers were able to succeed in rising through the ranks
and surviving the selection process, to say nothing of making it through R.C.S., which was, by all
accounts, a real horror. Lucas Priest had no illusions about ever being anything more than a simple dog
soldier.
Jesse Fain's case was more run-of-the-mill. She had done poorly on her S.A.T.s, as most everybody
who could not afford implant education did, and she had been presented with a truly enviable
proposition. She had been given a choice between working in the radioactive waste disposal and
reclamation systemтАФmining in the asteroid beltтАФor service in the army. She had joked wryly that it had
been a really tough decision.
They had just met and already they knew each other fairly well. Soldiers made friends quickly. They
had no other choice. Jesse was a young corporal who had just clocked in from serving a hitch under
Alexander Nevsky. It was not uncommon for Russian women of that time to join their men upon the field
of battle and Jesse had been out there on the frozen surface of the Neva, swinging a broadsword with the
best of them. It had been a welcome change of pace for her, since in ancient times a woman's place was
either at home, out front as gun fodder or on the receiving end of a rape. Jesse, accustomed to modern
equality between the sexes, hated the army with a passion.
"I can't tell you how good it felt," she said, "being in the thick of battle and splitting men's skulls!
God, I never thought I could be so bloodthirsty, but after all that I'd been through..."
Lucas grinned. "I hope you got it all out of your system."
"Not quite," she said, smiling. "But don't worry, you're safe enough. I'll buy the next round. What do
you say we get good and drunk?"
"No time like the present," Lucas said, and they both laughed at the old army in-joke.
For a soldier between hitches, getting drunk was almost a necessity. It was a way of coming down,
of slowing down. Even if the drinking was pursued to the point where it was impossible to move, the
army was very understanding. Each soldier wore dogtags color coded with the grid designation of their
next departure point. Shuttles made periodic checks of all the bars. The M.P.s simply dumped insensible