"Pournelle, Jerry - Mercenary (V1.0)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pournelle Jerry)

The Mercenary
By
Jerry Pournelle
TO: Sergeant Herman Liech, Regular Army, U.S.A.; and Second Lieutenant Zeneke
Asfaw, Kagnew Battalion, Imperial Guard of Ethiopia.
Acknowledgments
The battle in Chapter XIX is based in large part on the actual experience of Lieutenant
Zeneke Asfaw, Ethiopian Imperial Guard, during the Korean War.
Author's Note
This novel is part of the series of "future histories" in which The Mote in God's Eye takes
place, and it gives the early history of the events in that novel.

NEW WASHINGTON

Chronology
1969 Neil Armstrong sets foot on Earth's Moon.
1990 Series of treaties between U.S. and Soviet Union creates the CoDominium. Military
research and development outlawed.
1996 French Foreign Legion forms the basic element of the CoDominium Armed Ser-
vices.
2004 Alderson Drive perfected at Cal Tech.
2008 First Alderson Drive exploratory ships leave the Solar System.
2010-2100 CoDominium Intelligence Services engage in serious effort to suppress all
research into technologies with military applications. They are aided by zero-growth
organizations. Most scientific research ceases.
2010 Inhabitable planets discovered. Commercial exploitation begins.
2020 First interstellar colonies are founded. The CoDominium Space Navy and Marines
are created, absorbing the original CoDominium Armed Services.
2020 Great Exodus period of colonization begins. First colonists are dissidents, mal-
contents, and voluntary adventurers.
2030 Sergei Lermontov is born in Moscow.
2040 Bureau of Relocation begins mass outsystem shipment of involuntary colonists.
2043 John Christian Falkenberg is born in Rome, Italy.
2060 Beginnings of nationalistic revival movements.
Prologue.
An oily, acrid smell assaulted him, and the noise was incessant. Hundreds of
thousands had passed through the spaceport. Their odor floated through the embarkation
hall to blend with the yammer of the current victims crammed into the enclosure.
The room was long and narrow. White painted concrete walls shut out bright
Florida sunshine; but the walls were dingy with film and dirt that had been smeared about
and not removed by the Bureau of Relocation's convict laborers. Cold luminescent panels
glowed brightly above.
The smell and sounds and glare blended with his own fears. He didn't belong here,
but no one would listen.- No one wanted to. Anything he said was lost in the brutal totality
of shouted orders, growls of surly trustee guards in their wire pen running the full length of
the long hall; screaming children; the buzz of frightened humanity.
They marched onward, toward the ship that would take them out of the solar system
and toward an unknown fate. A few colonists blustered and argued. Some suppressed rage
until it might be of use. Most were ashen-faced, shuffling forward without visible emotion,
beyond fear.