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

suffering, and death.


CHAPTER Two

Until now the night has been silent, but I am now detecting motion and the crackle of dry brush
coming up the hill from the east. My port-side thermal sensors focus on the anomaly, resolving it
as an organic, a human male who has worked his way through the power fence encircling the
encampment and is jogging toward my position with evident determination. I track the target until
it reaches my preset defensive perimeter, at a range of fifty meters.

"Halt," I command, the words part of an old, old sentry routine left intact by the Masters for
this purpose. "Identify yourself."

There is no answer, but the organic has stopped at the fifty-meter perimeter. It is breathing
hard; I sense the pounding of its heart, the puffs of hot air escaping from its lungs at one-
second intervals. It is staring up at me, its eyes great, dark patches in the livid reds and
yellows of the thermal image of its face. It is carrying something which takes me.0032 second to
identify: a piece of wood, probably a piece of a tree branch, massing eight hundred grams and
measuring no more than half a meter in length. Its tracks, visible as a succession of fading green
footprints on the cooler ground behind it, mark the unsteady lurchings of its run up the hill. The
organic, I realize, is operating at the very limits of its endurance.

"You are not authorized to be here," I tell it. "Return to your assigned quarters immediately."

In answer, the organic screams, a 102-decibel shout that conveys no useful information. At the
same instant, the target raises the branch, brandishing it as it steps across the fifty-meter
perimeter line.

My response is automatic. My number one port-side antipersonnel battery fires, a single short,
sharp pulse of electrical power energizing the railgun's magfield along superconducting tracks.

The scream cuts off instantly.

The night is silent once more.

Jaime heard the slave's shriek of rage and frustration and terror in the darkness at the top of
the hill, and he heard the ringing chink as the Bolo triggered a round from one of its lateral A-P
batteries, chopping off the screamed challenge as abruptly as if flicking off a switch.

The Hector Option.

He wondered who the man had been, wondered if he'd known him.

Jaime let fifteen minutes pass before he rose from his hiding place behind a tumbled-down building
and started moving carefully up the hill. Generally, the Masters didn't even investigate when
Hector killed another straying slave, but sometimes they did, and he didn't want to stumble into
enemy sensor range.

Getting out of the camp was simple, an open secret long ago passed to everyone by word of mouth.