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

knew what they were doing, but they clearly did.
He fired again. The power core exploded, not in a single blast, but like a string of huge
firecrackers angling down through the hull toward the sonic cannon. She watched the machine,
her friends, and every hope she had of earning her way off this rock, plow into the riverbank,
sending up a shower of sand, smaller explosions sending shudders through its flame-engulfed
hull.
Her friends were dead, and if she didn't run, she was going to be as well. While the aliens
were still occupied watching the machine burn, she bolted, staggering as she slipped in the loose
sand.
She never saw how the small one noticed her, never heard him as he made pursuit. She didn't
even know the alien was there until the talons closed around the back of her neck, smashing her
face down into the ore-sand.
She struggled weakly, called out, barely able to hear her own voice. The creature rolled her
over effortlessly, the point of the alien's blade centimeters from her face.
She fought, but the talons on the creature's feet held her while it reached down to grab her
hair and yank it back hard.
Her hearing started to come back, just in time as the alien screamed and flashed toward her
neck. And this timeтАФthis time she understood the alien's meaning completely.
Victory.
***
Tyrus Ogden stood on a catwalk that crossed the roof of the vast vehicle hangar. On the floor
below, a space big enough to park a Concordiat cruiser of the line with room to spare, a half
dozen huge mining machines were being assembled or repaired. Voices echoed through the vast
space, sometimes shouted instructions, sometimes, eerily, a whisper relayed, as though by some
acoustic wormhole, from a hundred meters away. Power tools chattered, buzzed, and roared.
Brilliant flashes from a dozen different exotic welding methods cast colorful shadows on the
walls. The place smelled of ozone, hot metal, machine lubricant, and just a little of sweat.
 For Tyrus it should have been just another job. It could have been any world, literally. Big as
the building was, it was a standard prefab that he'd seen on a dozen planets. But he hadn't asked
to come here, hadn't planned to drag his family to this jungle hellhole of a mining colony. And
most of all, he hadn't planned on the machine whose superstructure towered up from the floor,
ending only a few meters below the catwalk. It was the machine beneath his feet that made the
job different. He looked down at the gleaming durachrome hull, the ranks of two-meter-wide
treads, the main turrets, each bigger than any house he'd ever lived in.
"Mr. Ogden," a man's voice, high and nasal, called from behind him.
Tyrus turned at the sound of dress shoes clattering on metal grate. The man walking towards
him was thin, dark, average height, dressed in an executive suit wholly inappropriate to the
environment. Tyrus recognized him from previous holo conversations. "Dyson, isn't it?"
Dyson shoved out his hand, and Tyrus shook it without enthusiasm. Company man.
"I see you're settling right in." He made a sweeping gesture to the machine below. "Like our
new mining machine?"
"It's a Bolo, Dyson." He looked down, but not at the machine. "You shouldn't be wearing
shoes like that up here. You slip, it's a long way down."
Dyson looked nervously down at his own feet. "I didn't know."
"I'm sure."
Dyson stepped cautiously up to the railing and looked over. "I do know about that, though. I
signed the purchase order. It's a Prescott 4800 surface excavator, the first of its kind."
"It's a Bolo, Dyson."
Dyson looked uncomfortable. "WellтАФit's that too. A converted Bolo actually, an old Mark
XX . . . I think, maybe a XXI. I don't know about those things. I hear Prescott found a whole