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

thousands of other ragged, filthy, half-starved, half-naked humans, slowly widened the dig,
exploring for the bits and scraps of their own shattered technology with bare and mud-caked hands.


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Life had become a nearly unendurable nightmare, an unending torture turned monotonous by the
routine of slave labor that went on for day after day, punctuated all too frequently by moments of
intense terror each time the Harvesters appeared. According to the calendar they'd been scratching
out on one wall of the barracks, they'd been here for just under a T-standard year.

Had it only been a year? Existence now was a damned good recreation of an eternity in Hell,
lacking, perhaps, in fire and brimstone, but more than adequate in the pain.

His probing fingers found a crumpled wad of metal, the surface so corroded he couldn't even tell
what it was... an appliance of some sort, he thought, maybe half of a power defroster, or possibly
a piece of a hand sterilizer. He worked it free and passed it to Wal; the relic filled the nylon
bag, so Wal struggled to his feet and started off across the dig, to the brooding presence of the
Collector squatting in the midst of the slave-filled pit.

Jaime kept working. To stop was to die, and while death was welcome, most of the slaves preferred
to wait and endure, knowing that there were far better ways to end this hell than to submit to the
hot blades and microlasers of the Harvesters.

Has it really been only a year?

One year ago, Celeste had been the largest, the grandest of human cities on the blue and temperate
world of Cloud, a white and sweeping growth of crystal-shining arcologies and polished, needle-
slim skypiercers rising along the blue curve of Celeste Harbor and the nearby coastlines of the
Tamarynth Sea. The city's population had numbered something just over one hundred thousand, and
the population of the planet as a whole had been nearly ten million.

CloudтАФnamed for the Sagittarian starclouds so prominent in the night skies of the northern
hemisphere's spring and summerтАФhad been colonized some two centuries ago by people fleeing the
horrors and uncertainties of the Melconian Wars. Those pioneers had purchased a dozen large
transports and abandoned several of the war-torn worlds near fair, lost Terra, seeking a new
homeworld somewhere among the teeming billions of suns swarming in and around the star-thick
reaches of the Galactic Core. They'd come from a dozen different worlds, from Destry and Lockhaven
and Aldo Cerise, from New Devonshire and Alphacent and from Terra herself. They'd come with a
single goal uniting them, the dream of a world where they could put down roots, raise crops and
families, and in general get on with life... in peace.

While the founders of Cloud had certainly included pacifists among their number, they'd not
allowed pacifistic principles to blind them to the dangers of colonizing a world some tens of
thousands of light years beyond human space; they'd brought both a military force and a Mark
XXXIII Bolo along as protection against the Unknown.

Unfortunately, the Unknown had found them, and the Unknown had been so unimaginably powerful that