"Archform - Beauty - 02 - Flash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

Say again coordinates...
It took three attempts to get the coordinates clear.
Meanwhile, I could hear the deeper sound of an antique heavy machine gun to the south. I could also sense telltales going off.
Bravo two ... Bravo two. Negative on CAS.
No time to question that one. I'd already lost half a platoon on the south end, all because CI wanted troops on the ground, and I had a mixed force, some commandos and some straight Marines, on a search and capture mission without the firepower necessary. I'd rather have just taken my own commandos, but I hadn't been given that choice.
Bravo two ... three-one here ... delta caught in cross fire ... quicksand stuff and deep paddies or something... couple of...
The implant transmission flared red and vanished. I'd lost another officer, and without air support, delta units were going to get shredded worse, and with century-old weapons at that. Long-range stunners and lasers didn't work in rain forests. Neither did HV rifles, not well. That was why I had my own antique, a design more than fifty years old, a stun-grenade launcher, but it wasn't that accurate at more than a hundred meters. Gulsan had one, too. He was flanking me.
Charlie one ... Charlie one, sweeping southeast, vee on me ... After my orders, and before long we were scuttling to the southeast, with more of the slugs shredding the taller soyl plants. Implant positioning showed that fire was coming from a knoll of sorts two hundred meters to the southeast. Some sort of crude revetment, but crude or not, it was good enough to stop lasers and hand weapons.
More telltales flicked red and gone.
At eighty meters from the revetment, with a narrow clear line before us, and slugs coming in at less than a meter above my head, mowing down the tops of the soyl plants, and even the shorter and bushier caak planted between the rows of soyl, I called a halt. Hold. Launchers centered.
Centered.
Fire!
After the first stun-grenade dropped into the revetment, someone tried to swing the old machine gun. They didn't get far.
A handful of illegals vaulted over the revetment and began to run. At that range, even in the fields on the edge of the rain forest, the HVs were effective. One hundred percent effective in the open.
In less than ten minutes, the field and the revetment were ours, but I had the men play it safe, and it was more like a half hour before I climbed over the edge of the makeshift revetment and surveyed what lay there.
The heavy fire had come from more than a dozen locals. Bodies were four men, six women, and two children. That didn't count the others that delta company had taken down when they'd bolted the makeshift revetment. The ones who had stayed inside had been crouching behind rotten logs, plastered with dried mud and covered with vegetation. I could see their ribs. One of the women was ten years older than my mother. She looked that old, maybe wasn't, but one side of her chest was blown away. That was what happened when grenades designed to stun troops in nanite-boosted uniforms went off too close to unprotected flesh. The old woman's teeth were black stubs.
CI, Bravo two. Site secured. This time the uplink was clear. Ready for documentation.
That's a negative, Bravo two. Torch and return. Torch and return. Op concluded. Torch and return.
Interrogative, torch and return?
That's affirm. Torch and return. Notify when you reach pickup area.
Roger.
We were "helping" the Guyanan president. The world knew that. But we weren't supposed to be engaging in operations. The only problem was that the Guyanan army couldn't find its way across a plowed field without tripping, and the multis were screaming to the Legislature and the Executory.
Bravo force. Deploy torches. Deploy torches.
A half hour later, we were trudging westward, patrols out.
I glanced back at the heavy black smoke that rose into the sullen sky. Even with the fields a quarter kay behind us, the odor permeated everything, a combination of burning rubber and rancid cooking oil.
"Why're we here, Colonel? Really?" That was Lieutenant Verglen, fresh-faced and right out of the Academy.
"C1 says that a third of the caak coming into NorAm starts in this valley."
"So we've got to pay so that AVia doesn't lose creds on somatin?"
"We're just here to make sure that the Guyanan people stay under the liberated rule of President Amao. That's the official line." That was the official line, and I was a light colonel. I didn't mention what else we all knewЧthat MultiCor frowned on freelance production of soyl hydrocarbons that might compete with the MultiCor energy consortium.
"And we have to follow the official line, sir, don't we?"
ZZZZZZZZzzzzzz...
A dull, off-key buzzing rolled through the skyЧand the damp of the rain forest was gone. I was still sweating as I sat up and hit the alarm button.
Guyana ... more than ten years ago.
I still had dreamsЧexcept they were too real. Flashbacks. Reexperienced reality.
Reexperienced in far too real a fashion.
I lurched up from the bed and staggered toward the exercise clothes on the rack. Food and tea and exercise would help. They always did.

Chapter 2

The screen showed a body on the stasis slab. Short dark brown hair topped an oval faceЧsquare-jawed and clean-shavenЧa face a trace too long to be perfectly proportioned. Dark half-circles lay under open unseeing eyes and thick eyebrows. No lines crossed the smooth forehead, and none radiated from the corners of the eyes. A sheet covered the lower part of the body, but it could not conceal that the area below the chest had been crushed.
"Almost looks flash," observed Yenci, blade-slender in the dark grays of a safety officer. "Too perfect. No history. Just a pretty face. Except pretty faces don't look so pretty when they're dead."
Silence followed the safo's words.
"Do we have an ID on this one?" Yenci finally asked.
"No ID."
"GIL check?" pursued the safo, the edge in her voice muted.
"No match."
"Not in the whole friggin' world? No trace to an existing clone pattern, no commercial cydroids, nothing? We've got three .. three clone/ cydroids, all different, and there's not a trace to anyone?" Yenci's blue eyes hardened, although they were never softer than agate at most times, even when registering through scanners. "Your banks and systems can't find anything?"
"There is no match to DNA within acceptable parameters."
"What the frig does that mean?"
"The vast majority of human DNA is shared. Ninety-nine percent is close to identical to certain other primate speciesЧ"