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

"By God, you do have it covered." The LT whistled. "But how? The engineers are still at brigade. How'd
you do this?"

Mary let her breath out slowly. How do you explain to a kid that never wanted to be anything but a toy
soldier what it's like to spend twenty years of your life in the asteroid mines, to never want to be anything
but a miner? And to get your pink slip and draft notice in the same envelope. "Our last shift at the mine,
we figured if something might save our life, and it wasn't welded to the deck, we might as well borrow it.
Boss men had just installed a lot of new equipment." Which was why they could afford to let half their
workforce goтАФthe senior half. They'd gotten all kind of media plaudits ... and ignored the seniority
clause of their labor contract.

Mary shrugged, or tried to. Armored space suits didn't allow much body language. "Who knows what
was gonna be surplus, anyway?" Mary knew damn well the old equipment had already been sold off.
She and the other members of her investment club had wanted to buy it. They were close, so close to
setting up their own mine, having their own place, being their own people. But the gear went without an
auction. And Mary and her friends got themselves a war.

So Mary had walked off her last shift with a jet cart.

"We're about done with the minefield," Mary finished.

"Hurry up and get back here," the LT answered.

Now Mary did fidget. "Sir, remember our deal."

"What part of it?" The LT's voice was cautious.

The first time Mary was elected sergeant had been a joke, a setup by a tough drill instructor to break his
ex-civilians of their easygoing ways. The miners voted for her;Dumont 's kids voted for him, but there
were more miners. Mary was supposed to fall flat on her face. Instead, she'd found what it took to pull
this angry bunch of people together. Sometimes begging. sometimes cajoling, sometimes threatening.

TheyтАЩd coalesced into a team for her. Maybe not the team the DI had in mind, but a team that pulled
together when they had to.

The lieutenant had shadowed the platoon the last few days of boot camp, long enough to see how things
were. Then he'd taken Mary aside. "You know how to work this bunch," he'd said.

"Seems that way," she'd answered cautiously.

"I know how to fight. You know how to make them work. Together, we can get them out of this war
alive. If anybody can. You game to work with me?"

He'd been the first to even mention survival; she'd taken his offered hand. For the last two months they'd
been a team. Now, she'd find out just how far she could stretch it.

"Lieutenant, I can't leave this network I've built. In the mines, you get too far away from the work,
something goes wrong and you can't fix it. From here I can fix anything."

"Sergeant, I've told you a dozen times, your job is to tell other people what to do. Assign somebody to