"Keith Laumer - Bolos 8 - Bolo Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

"Cloud's suns have three separate planetoid belts," Dieter said, nodding. "You're right. The
cluckers could

23 get all the nickel-iron they wanted by mining the belts. Other stuff, too. Gold. Uranium.
Platinum. Just about anything they need, and enough of it to last for centuries. Compared to what
they could get cheaply and easily out there, this scavenger hunt in the ruins is nothing."

"Right," Jaime said. "So where are their orbital smelters, their asteroid mining ships, their deep
space ore processors?"

"Maybe they're there," Wal pointed out. "We're hardly in a position to see their belt activities,
are we?"

"No, wait," Alita said. "Dieter put his finger on it. If they had access to belt resources,
there'd be absolutely no point to collecting broken glass or gold rings. Why bother with steel
clasps from rotted clothing, when one small nickel-iron asteroid will provide you with all the
steel you need for the next thousand years or so? It's stupid."

"If we knew why they act this way," Jaime told the others, "it might give us a weapon."

"Don't see how," Dieter said.

"Knowledge is always a weapon," Jaime told him. "You just have to learn how to apply it."

"You're getting at something," Wal suggested.

"Maybe." He scooped up the last of me rice and chewed thoughtfully. "Maybe," he said again after a
long pause, "I'm going out to see Hector tonight."

"You think that's wise, Major?" Alita said. "With Delamar coming upтАФ"

"The clackers can see in the dark," he reminded her. "I'll be no safer with a moon and the
starclouds up than I would be on a pitch-black cloudy night. Sometimes, I think they know... and


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don't care."

"Enough people go up the hill to take the Hector Option," Wal said, ^feah, you could be right."

Alita laid one slim hand on Jaime s arm. "You... will come back?"

"I'll be back," he told her. "I'm not ready to option out yet."

Inside, though, he wasn't as confident as he sounded. One of these days, he was pretty sure he
would take the Hector Option.

It was, everyone agreed, the best, the cleanest ending available in this nightmare of filth,