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

"Yeah. It was dark, we didn't see 'em until it was all over. We were lucky,
they only got Rudy. I check on him every once in a while."
 "You must really hate them," Khadaji said.
The Sub-Lojt shook his head. "You know what the funny thing is? I don't,
really. But seeing Rudy reminds me of what it is I do for a living." The man
paused to stare at his splash for a moment. "I was remembering a time on
Wu," the trooper said. "That's in the Haradali System."
Khadaji nodded again. "I've heard of it."
"Yeah, well, we had to go in and flatten a local insur-rectтАФbunch of
malcons somehow managed to get control of a city and were making a lot of
noise. A simple operation, by-the-tape, more gunship diplo than anything
else. We waved the flag from a battlecruiser and a couple of support ships
and sent a few centplexes down to show Confed muscle, you probably know
the drill."
"Yes. I know it."
"Well, I went down with my quad and got stuck doing guard duty on a
secured perimeter, no perspiration. Then, some fuzzbrain in the malcons got
the idea to try a raid. They sent maybe a hundred against us, armed with
sticks and thero-knives and a few chemical-only slug guns."
The Sub-Lojt paused and took a drink of the new mug of splash. "Stupid,"
he said. "Practically unarmed against a quad, none of us virgins. We cut them
down like it was target practice. It was stupid of them, stupid?"
Khadaji sipped his champagne.
"It was not our fault, 'they'd have wiped us, they could have, we were only
doing our jobs. But after it, I went with the medics to check for survivors. We
were using .177s with the harrad load, so there weren't many. But there was
this... girl." He paused and took another swallow of his drink, closing his
eyes as he did. "This girl was maybe thirteen and she was lying there with
her legs shot off from from the middle of the thighs down. And she looked
up at me while the medics were clamping vessels and pumping dorph into
her to kill the pain and I swear I never saw such clear green eyes before or
since. And she smiled and said, 'It's all right. My father is a soldier.' And then
she died. Massive hemo-shock, the medics said."
The Sub-Lojt finished his splash and set the mug down gently. "That was
the bad part. As if it was okay for me to shoot her, because I was a soldier
like her father." He shook his head. "A system that makes people kill
children, it's just not right. If something like that ever comes up again, I don't
know if I could shoot. I haven't seen any of the Shamba Scum, but if I saw a
bunch of kids coming at me waving sticks, I just don't know what I'd do this
time. Can you understand how I might feel like that?"
Khadaji nodded, and stared unseeing at the far wall of the octagon. "Yes,"
he said, finally. "I can understand."


Chapter Four

AT ONE-THIRTY, Khadaji went to his rooms. The Reflex was mostly gone,
but there was enough of the drug in his system to keep him awake for a
couple of hours, if he'd let it. Instead, he took three hundred milligrams of
parame-thaqualoneтАФPaco, it was called in the pubтАФand stretched out on the