"Mike Moscoe - Society of Humanity 01 - First Casualty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moscoe Mike)

of that platoon are out-of-work miners. Remember the complaints you fielded from several mine
administrators about missing equipment, even a jet cart?"

"God, those things are expensive. Even the Navy can't afford 'em. Though I'd love to have one."

Inez's grin dripped admiration for the culprits. "You may. Each company of the First of the Eighty-eighth
has one platoon heavy with miners. All three weighed in heavy at boarding but not enough to complain
about." She paused for a moment. "You remember how tickled Comm was to get all those extra
channels. It was an old miner, pulling boards from a 'damaged parts' box, that got them for us."

Captain Anderson raised an eyebrow. "You didn't tell me."

"Sir, a good exec doesn't bother her boss with the details."

"What else haven't you bothered me with, Izzy?"

"I wish I knew. There's a shit-pot of stuff out there, and I've only scratched the surface. Despite the
rumors, I am only human and rarely can be in more than three places at once."

Andersonignored the humor; today he needed an exec who could be in a dozen places at once.
Scowling down at his command display, he shook his head. He'd fought the coming battle hundreds of
times in his forty-year careerтАФon the computer display.

Now he was fighting it for real, and it was going wrong in ways even the craziest umpire would not have
thrown at him in a war game. Why had a picket boat been waiting for them the moment they jumped into
this worthless system? Why was a major colonial force reacting in only seventy-two hours?

He'd expected problems on his side. Lasers were missing parts; power plants were missing cables;
crates were miscoded, misplaced, or just plain missing. Most of his grunts were ransacking containers,
chasing the critical parts he needed to get the central defenses up. Without them, the colonials could land
smack dab in the middle of his base crater. He'd expected time to work all this out. Only one platoon
from each company had been shoved forward to block the three cracks in the crater wall.

Everything had gone too fast or too wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the sensors from that platoon would let
him give the colonials a surprise or two.

****

Mary took a deep breath and tried to give the lieutenant an answer he'd like. "I set up the sensors you
ordered, sir." She keyed up the different coverages she'd deployed: video, thermal, radar,
electromagnetic. She ignored the Navy issue crapтАФthey were too big and too noisy to be anything but
targets.

"We don't have all that gear, Sergeant. How'd you do it?" That was two questions. Mary chose to
answer the easy one. With a flick of her wrist, she called up the schematic of the crater rim and the array
she'd dug through it. "I used diggers from the mines to set this up. I got the place covered."

She activated the laser designators one by one, let them sweep the broken ground in front of the pass
the platoon was ordered to hold at all cost.