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

The First Casualty v2

By: Mike Moscoe

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EVERY ALARM IN Sergeant Mary Rodrigo's space suit went off at once. Red lights flashed on her eyeball as her heads-up display demanded her attention. She ignored them.

Mary had five moles laying a minefield for her. Mines were tricky beasts. Laying a field from underground was a tight bitch, not to be left to unsupervised remotes. Twitching her right hand, she froze them in place.

Mary twisted her right wrist and blinked twice, cycling her heads-up display to the screen her alarms were so hot on. The newly deployed infrared sensors were screaming about hot targets. But there weren't supposed to be any- yet!

She chinned her mike to a new channel. "Lek, we got a problem. Either our sensors are spooked, or the colonials got here without you knowing."

"Not bloody likely," the old guy said with a chuckle.

"Check the angles from the two outer sensors, girl. We've picked up the Colly attack fleet coming around Eimo Four!"

"Acid crap," Mary swore. "They're that sensitive!"

"Bet they made a fuel scoop and got their balloon heat shields out," Dumont said beside her, "What a ride for real, not just a vid-game," the young man from the streets said wistfully.

"I better pass this to the LT," Mary growled. "Let's get back to the mines." In the end, even Dumont and his street kids had voted her for sergeant, but that didn't mean he couldn't give her plenty of lip before he did what she said.

Today, without a word, Dumont went back to putting in mines. On the other side of Mary, reliable Cassie had never quit work on the minefield.

Mary switched to the command channel- "Lieutenant, we got targets."

"Sergeant, where the hell have you been? What?" His voice died in mid-question as Mary passed through the visual- "What... Where ... How ... ?" he stammered.

"This is Major Henderson at battalion. What have you got for me?" So the battalion CO was lurking on their command channel, or had an alert on it. Considering all the lurking and alerts Lek had rigged through me brigade's net, Mary had no complaint.

She shut up; let the young officer talk to the man. Only when the wait stretched and started to bend did she speak.

"Our infrared sensors have picked up the colonials coming around Eimo Four. We don't have an ETA on them," she said, though she suspected Lek did by now. No need telling management what they didn't want to hear from dumb worker bees.

"Brigade finally risked a radar sweep about the time the bandits went behind the gas giant," battalion drawled.

"I'll pass this report along. Colonials are right on schedule."

Which was not what the command net had been saying for the last fifteen hours. Lek had warned Mary not to believe the official word from HQ. She'd learned long ago not to trust what a foreman said. The old electronic wizard had been passing along to Mary and the rest of the unemployed miners the straight dope, Battalion signed off; the young LT found his voice.

"Sergeant, what the hell is going on here? We've got to talk."

What the sergeant had going on here was her own usual go at making everyone happy, to give the LT what he wanted, and the rest of the platoon what they wanted. What Mary wanted was to be light-years away from all this with a beer in one hand and a warm hunk on her shoulder. But today, nobody was getting what they wanted. With a sigh, Mary got ready for a long talk.

Captain Anderson, commander, th Defense Brigade, frowned at his screen- "Since when does a leg infantry platoon have infrared sensors that good? Not that I'm complaining, but..."