"Tom Purdom-Legacies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

Legacies
by Tom Purdom
This story copyright 2000 by Tom Purdom. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


Deni Wei-Kolin was asleep in the childcare center at Hammarskjold Station when the fifteen assault
vehicles began their kamikaze run into Rinaswandi Base. Rinaswandi was in the asteroid belt, about a
third of the way around the sun from the Earth-Moon system, so it would be a good twenty-five minutes
before a signal carrying news of the attack reached Hammarskjold and the other man-made satellites that
orbited Earth and Luna. The signal would actually reach Hammarskjold a full second later than it reached
some of the other habitats, in fact. Hammarskjold was the off-Earth military headquarters of the UN
Secretariat and it had been placed in a lunar orbit, for the kind of accidental political reasons that usually
decide such matters. Given the positions of the Earth and the Moon at the time the signal started its
journey, the message from Rinaswandi actually had to zap past Earth before a big antenna sucked it into
Hammarskjold's electronic systems.
Deni's mother, Gunnery Sergeant Wei, got the news a bit earlier than most of the fifteen billion people
who currently inhabited the solar system. The military personnel stationed in Rinaswandi Base had been
under siege for seventeen days when the attack began. For twelve hours out of every twenty-four, Deni's
mother had been plugged into the Rinaswandi defense system, ready to respond the moment the alert
signal pinged into her ear and the injector built into her combat suit shot a personalized dose of
stimulant/tranquilizer into her thigh.
All around Sergeant Wei people were beginning to stir. There were twenty of them crammed into the
command module -- a place that was only supposed to provide working space for six -- and you
couldn't shift your weight without disturbing someone. Half of them were merely observers -- support
people and administrative wallahs. Gunnery Sergeant Wei could hear little whispers and murmurs as they
caught glimpses of the symbols moving across the screens in front of the combat specialists.
The stimulant/tranquilizer started spreading its chemical blessings through Sergeant Wei's nervous
system. The long, carefully groomed fingers of her left hand slipped into position just below the key pad
she would use to direct the missiles, guns, and electronic devices under her control.
The acting commander of Rinaswandi Base, Logistics Captain Tai, was a slender young man who
tended to relate to his subordinates with a lot of handclapping and mock-enthusiastic banter. Even now,
when the arrows and icons on his screens represented real vehicles armed with real ammunition, the
voice in Sergeant Wei's earphones sounded like it was sending some kind of sports team into a
tournament.
"All right, people. As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, they're all bunched up on one side of our
happy little home, in Quadrants III and IV. Apparently they're hoping they can overwhelm whatever
we've got on that side. Gunner Three -- take the eight targets on the left in your quadrant. Gunner Four
-- take everything in your quadrant plus the four on the right in Quadrant Three. Gunner One, Gunner
Two -- be prepared to switch your attentions to the other two quadrants. But I would appreciate it -- to
say the least -- if you would keep an eye out for anybody trying to slip in on your side while we're
looking the other way. Let's not assume they're as dumb as we think they are."
In the childcare center, twenty-five light-minutes away, Sergeant Wei's son was sleeping with his right
arm draped across the stuffed animal he had been given when he was two -- a hippopotamus, about half
as long as he was tall, that Deni had named Ibar. Two of the children sleeping near him had parents on
Rinaswandi. Six had parents on the four hydrogen-fusion torch ships that had accelerated away from