"Ardath Mayhar - Shock Treatment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mayhar Ardath)

Now the carriers were grinding up the slope, over the roads that had been well kept and
smooth-surfaced until the Commander had turned paranoid eyes toward the lush fields and the rich
forests of Tellich Grange. What threat had he read there? Falville wondered, as he lay

flat amid the shattered grain, hoping those now traveling over the pitted roads were not using
heat-sensors as a precaution.

The sausage-shaped vehicles pounded forward on their tough treads, the one-way glass of their ports
staring out over the countryside. Smoothly indented curves marked the spots where nozzles could open
and flood the area about them with fire and death. To men armed only with weapons improvised from
agricultural machinery and chemicals, it was impossible to stop.

About him, his men breathed so lightly that even he heard nothing but the chirp of a cricket in the
hedgerow. The soil beneath his cheek quivered with the weight of the machines on the road. The leaves
left on the grain shook, too, and the cricket went silent, as if even it might be threatened by the armored
men who rode in the carriers.

He didn't risk an eye above the grain until the last had labored past, leaving its own contribution to the
destruction of the roadway. In the distance, the metal tubes went forward over the low hill to the north,
their camouflaged sides almost invisible against the dull greens of the fields and the forest.

Not even then did Falville signal his men to rise. He had learned painfully, over the months of the war, to
distrust the enemy profoundly. What seemed to be, in dealing with the forces of Theron Standish, was
never what was. Instead, he slithered around and headed toward the rear

of the grain field, toward the low wall of trees marking the edge of Coldfellow Wood.

The Commander's men seemed to fear forests as much as their leader did. They avoided entering them,
and they destroyed any forest in their way. But Coldfellow Wood was distant from the roads, far from
any town or hamlet, and uninhabited except by those who lived by their wits in its depths.

Those had been people with prices on their heads, in days gone by, but now they might well turn out to
be allies, for Standish hated and feared men who walked free in forests even more than the forests
themselves. A day would come, and those shrewd mavericks knew it, when he would fire the trees from
the Elannish border to the Sterne Rift, just to destroy his combined devils.



They made good time through the wood. All too soon they left the sheltering trees in order to

cut across fields and pastures to the encampment of the combined Resistance. Though Falville had urged
his general to set up his command post deep in a forest, he had chosen instead to put it in plain sight, on a
long stretch of pasture devoted to goats.

An earthen enclosure lay up against a cliff that formed the edge of a series of downs; it was sheltered
there from the cold winds of winter and the glaring sun of summer. There General Coville put his
headquarters, though the huts the goatherds had raised over the years were now little but accumulations
of framework and brush.

Now, approaching the place, Falville had to admit it was an effective disguise for a military post. Goats