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

"You'd better get back to work, Jaime," a cracked and dry-throated voice whispered at his side.
"If the trusties don't see you, the clackers for damned sure will."

"As long as I keep moving, Wal," he replied, his own voice sounding just as ragged in his own
ears. He glanced at his companion. WalтАФformerly Colonel Waldon Josep Prescott of the Cloud Defense
ForcesтАФ knelt in the mud by Jaime's side, a nylon bag strapped to the red-scarred stump of his
left forearm, as he scratched through the muck with his right hand. His body, what could be seen
of it through its glistening coat of slime and clay, was shockingly emaciated, the ribs showing
like curved bars through taut, mud-encrusted skin, while both his hair and beard were matted and
unkempt.

Jaime didn't need to see his own mud-coated body to know that he didn't look much better. Wal,
though, was fifteen years older than Jaime and hadn't been in as good physical condition ayear ago
when the !.!.! had appeared in Cloud's skies. Both his left hand and his right eye had been
harvested some months back, and the brutality of the past year had ground him down to a shadow of
his former self. Jaime doubted that the colonel would be able to survive much longer.

As for himself, well, all of his body parts were intact so far, but there was no way of telling
how long that condition would last. The worst of it for him was the debilitation brought on by
constant work, unrelenting stress, and chronic malnutrition.

A faint, warbling hum warned of the approach of a floater eye, and reluctantly, he tore his eyes
from the sky and made himself look busy. When he sensed the spy hovering close beside him, he
looked up but kept digging-Softball-sized and steel-gray in color, the floater hovered on internal
contra-gravs that set his bare skin to prickling with the local buildup of a static charge. On the
sphere's equator, a single, disturbingly human eye stared down at him from within a precisely
crafted hollow on the floater s surface, unwinking, glistening in its trickling bath of nutrient
solution, the iris a pale blue in color.

He wondered whose eye it was. Not Wal's, certainly, whose remaining eye was brown. Besides,
speculation among those slaves with medical training and knowledge held that parts harvested from
humans wouldn't survive more than a few weeks before they started to die, though there was no



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proof of that.

After a few tense moments, with Jaime continuing to feel through the mud, the warble increased in
pitch and the floater eye drifted away. There were hundreds of the things adrift above the dig,
constantly watching the slaves and presumably relaying what they saw to the Masters.

Keep working. Have to keep working....

Not for the first time, he considered the Hector Option. It would be quick, almost easy... and
without the agony of vivisection if the Masters came for him. Others had taken the Hector Option,
lots of them... with more and more attempting it each week.