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

Hammarskjold Station, crammed with troops and equipment, two days after Rinaswandi had come under
siege.
Every day all the children in the childcare center stretched out on the big shaggy rug in the playroom
and listened to a briefing. Every day, the younger ones focused their best I'm-a-good-student stares on
an orbital diagram that showed the current positions of Hammarskjold Station, Rinaswandi, the four torch
ships, and a place in the asteroid belt called Akara City. They all knew, as well as their young minds
could grasp it, that Akara City had been ruled for five decades by a strong-willed mayor who had turned
it into a bustling commercial center in which half a million people took full advantage of the raw materials
available in the asteroid belt. The mayor had died, her successor had been caught in a financial scandal,
and the turmoil had somehow led to a classic breakdown of social order -- a breakdown that had been
manipulated by an obscure married couple who had emigrated to Akara City after they had been chased
out of a Zen-Random communal colony. In the last six months, according to the teachers who gave the
briefing, Mr. and Mrs. Chen had done some "very bad things." One of the bad things they had done had
been killing people -- about three hundred, according to the most believable news reports. They had also
engaged in approximately two thousand involuntary personality modifications -- but that was a crime
young children sometimes had trouble understanding.
Six weeks ago, a hundred troops could have torched into Rinaswandi Base, picked up the weapons
and fighting vehicles stockpiled in its vaults, and deposed Mr. and Mrs. Chen in a few hours. As usual,
however, the international politicians had dithered about "sovereignty" and the exact border that defined
the line between "internal" and "external" affairs. And while they dithered, Mr. and Mrs. Chen had
managed to establish communications with an officer at Rinaswandi who had been greedier than his
psychological profiles had indicated. The equipment stockpiled in Rinaswandi had become part of the
Chens' arsenal and the personnel stationed in Rinaswandi had crammed themselves into their command
module and started watching their screens.
The teachers at the childcare center would never have told their charges the politicians had "dithered,"
of course. They were officers in the Fourth International Brigade. Proper military people never say bitter
things about politicians during official, approved briefings.
Nobody on Hammarskjold told Deni they felt sorry for him, either. That was another thing military
people didn't do. If anyone had given Deni a pat and a sympathetic word, however, he would have
thanked them very politely and even looked a little thoughtful. For a moment, in fact, he would have
thought he really did feel sad.
Deni's mother had been stationed on Rinaswandi for two months before the siege had broken out. For
most of the second month, his father, Assault Sergeant Kolin. had been trying to convince him a boy his
age shouldn't sleep with a stuffed hippopotamus. It hadn't been as bad as the time his father had made
him stop wetting the bed. That time Deni had been forced to endure almost six weeks of hand slappings,
sarcastic baby talk, and "confinement to quarters" in a sopping bed.
Deni was was seven years old. For four of those years -- over half his lifetime -- one of his parents
had been away on some kind of military assignment. When his mother was gone, he lived with an
easy-going, enjoy-it-while-you-can father whose basic indolence was punctuated by periods in which
Assault Sergeant Kolin became obsessed by the belief his son needed "discipline." When his father was
away, Deni's days were dominated by a goal-oriented mother who believed every moment of a child's
life should be as productive as she could make it. When they were both home, he frequently found
himself pressing against a wall, knees doubled against his chest, while they engaged in "domestic disputes"
that sometimes ended in bruised faces and even broken bones.
Deni's day to day life in the childcare center had its flaws. He still had to sit through the daily message
Sergeant Wei videoed from Rinaswandi, in spite of the siege. He still had to send his mother a return
message in which he assured her he was practicing his flute two hours and fifteen minutes every day --
the minimum a boy as talented as her son should practice, in Sergeant Wei's opinion. He still had to
spend three hours a week talking to an officer named Medical Captain Min, who kept pestering him with
questions about the way he felt about different things. All in all, however, the last fifteen days of Deni's life