"Steve Perry - Matador 01 - The Man Who Never Missed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Empty. No one home. He clicked the spook-eyes off.
In a second, he was through the door and out, locking it with his
thumbprint. He scuttled to the shadows next to the wall of the Jade Flower
and flattened himself against the cool plastcrete. He would stay in the
shadows for this one. He took a deep breath and moved off, feeling the
Reflex dance in his muscles.
 The T-plex was brightly lit, a half-dozen big HT lamps overlapping their
pools of daytime around the building. It was standard Confed architecture,
squat and ugly, a prefab block of expanded hardfoam with carved door and
windows. Right now, whoever was on electronic watch would be getting
signals from Khadaji's confounder andтАФif they were awakeтАФwondering
what the Doppler ghosts were fuzzing the screen. The confounder was the
best the Confed could produceтАФit wasn't even issued to these troops it was
so newтАФand Khadaji had paid a small fortune for it less than a year ago. It
was unlikely the simadam running the scopes would know what the
problem was.
The lights were something else, of course. The quad did have image
intensification equipment equal to his own. With spookeyes lit, the quad
could see an area framed only in starlight as if it were a bright afternodn.
Shorting the lights out, therefore, should not be to his advantage.
Khadaji grinned. The problem with the military mind was that it tended to
be logical only to a point that satisfied it, but no further. The way to out-think
the military was to carry its logic one step past.
He hooked a simple timer-and-popper against the unshielded transformer
and set the delay for twenty seconds. He scurried back, keeping to the
shadows, until he was in front of the T-plex. The quad was alert and
prowling; no virgins, theseтАФthey were crack troopers, all Sub-Lojts chosen
for skill to form this special unit. The woman on the other side of the door
they guardedтАФvisible through the hard plastic windowтАФwas a Sub-
Befalhavare, one of ten on planet. She commanded a thousand troopers and
was, therefore, a valuable person. The Confed had done one intelligent thing
with its military and that had been to clean up the old-style ranks found on
most worlds. The organization had been streamlined for ground troops: four
troopers made a quad, commanded by a Sub-Lojt; twenty-five quads formed
a centplex, with a Lojtnant running the show; ten centplexes overseen by a
Sub-Befalhavare made a ten-kay unit; and the commander of ten thousand
troopers was a full Befalhavare. That was the size of the unit on Greaves, a
ten kay. The next rank was a Systems Marshal, an Over-Befalhavare, then the
Supreme Commander of Confederation Ground Forces Himself. Only five
ranks between a line trooper and the S.C.
There was a loud pop and the HT lamps began to fade. Khadaji slid his
spookeyes down and flicked them on at minimum, but kept his eyes closed.
The intensified light of the dying lamps flashed brilliantly at his closed eyes.
 He heard one of the quad yell, "Amplifiers on!"
Good. He was counting on their training. These four would be ready for
the darkness by the time the last glimmer faded from the lamps.
Khadaji opened his eyes as the light against them dimmed; he adjusted the
spookeyes to compensate for the darkness. Green-on-green images came into
ghostly focus. An eye-smiting glare poured from the window of the Sub-
Befalhavare's office and he looked away from it, concentrating on the