"Keith Laumer - Bolos 6 - Cold Steel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

Eventually all the jungle would be gone from this valley as they mined the saganium, but that
would take at least a year and she planned on being gone, headed back into civilized space, long
before then. Ten years from now this valley would be twice as deep and wide as it was now, a
scar big enough to see from orbit. There were ten colonies and more than double that number of
mining sites spread around the planet. This planet, with its smells and heat was barely worth
inhabiting now. She had no doubt that in ten years the place would be nothing more than a large
pile of rock orbiting a weak sun.
She dropped down onto the ground and rested her back against a boulder. As the machine
slowly moved away from her, the Caesar salad smell was already fading, replaced by a stench
like mildew, old socks and rotting garbage. Now, after two weeks, she was starting to get used to
the smells of this ugly planet. Not all the way yet, but enough that they didn't make her choke
anymore. It was ironic that the only way to get a good smell out of the jungle was to blast it to
hell, and even that didn't last.
She took a deep breath and let the solidness of the ground ease the tension of a long morning
inside the pulverizer. She would take a few minutes, then get back to work. They were pushing
the grinder as fast as it would go, and she had every intention of getting the bonus promised them
if they made the cliff at the head of the valley in two weeks. The more money she made, the
quicker she could head out of here, get back to school, finish the degree in architecture. Then all
this labor would just become a bad memory, laughed at over drinks and a good meal.
Suddenly the smell of rot engulfed her even more strongly, and a branch cracked just behind
her.
"WhatтАФ?"
She sprang to her feet and spun around.
For a moment her mind didn't register what she was seeing. Along the edge of the jungle were
at least twenty massive alien creatures. For a moment she thought that they were predators of
some kind, that she'd been wrong about the sound scaring them away. The things were vaguely
humanoid, small heads mounted on massive, fur-covered bodies. The fur was black and scattered
with bold, irregular white spots. The things hunched slightly as they spotted her, their heads
shifting nervously as they looked at her, first with one side-mounted eye, then the other, like
massive birds. The lips on their wide mouths looked hard, beaklike, adding to the impression that
these things were somehow in the bird family.
At first, she didn't realize they wore clothes, their black loincloths and harnesses blended so
well with their fur. It was only when she saw the primitive hand weapons, curved knives, long
blades mounted on shafts to create something like a cross between a spear and a broadsword, that
she was sure she was dealing with intelligent creatures. The biggest of them also carried a long,
heavy-looking, leather bag over his shoulder, though he lacked the spear/sword that the others
carried.
Natives? The damned survey hadn't said anything about natives. She tried to remember
something, anything that she'd been taught about first contact in school, but it was all gone,
vanished down the same mental sinkhole as hyperspatial geometry and most of her Earth history.
She held up her hands, trying to indicate she was unarmed. "Where did you come from?" she
asked, managing to choke down the fear. That was stupid. Like they could understand her. Why
had she left her side arm back in the pulverizer? It was regulation that she always carry it, just as
it was regulation that they stay inside their machine for the entire shift. But there weren't
supposed to be any aliens on this planet, especially aliens as big as these beasts.
The creature closest to her just turned its head from side to side, its birdlike black eyes staring
down at her with great intensity, even if she couldn't read the emotion behind it. The creature
showed no sign that it understood her. Of course, it wouldn't.
She eased a step back, trying not to move too suddenly. The smallest of the creatures, still a
good three heads taller than she was, stepped forward, lowered his spear-weapon, and casually