"John Ringo - The Legacy of the Aldenata 5 - The Hero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

remarkably good cloaking material for all the normal methods of detection; it meant atmosphere to
deflect particles and other life signs to disappear among.
The Blobs did not appear to be stupid and they seemed to use the same general logic system as
humans. That meant that they were as aware of the needs as the humans. And they would guess that the
humans would know this. So they were probably prepared for a reconnaissance of some sort.
The missions related to this might be very nasty, brutish and short. The team knew this, and tried to
avoid admitting it by joking around the subject. Any mission could be their last, and current events were
less than promising. A couple of teams had disappeared lately. Nobody knew where they went, or what
had happened; they weren't on the need-to-know list about other team missions. They simply received
the bald reports that team such-and-so was "missing; presumed lost."
While the team discussed missing comrades, the team commander showed up. He was a familiar
enough sight, working with them daily as he did, and standing orders were not to waste time saluting
unless a field grade officer was along. They were formal enough for discipline, relaxed enough for
camaraderie. What made the team stiffen their postures and grow instantly quiet was the strange creature
accompanying the captain. It was a sight almost never seen to human eyes: a Darhel. In uniform.
The group instinctively bristled. Even after almost a millennium of contact the Darhel were not
popular. They had once been virtual slavemasters of the human race. They still had the reputation of
being dishonorable, untrustworthy Shylocks. The few humans who dealt with them found them to be as
shifty as sand and mean as rattlesnakes; they seemed to take great pleasure not just in making money but
in screwing people while they did so. While none of the team had dealt directly with Darhel before, they
all knew the stories.
Bringing warnings of the Posleen, voracious interstellar beings who stripped planets as locusts do
fields, the Darhel had provided technology and weapons to humanity in exchange for human strategic
expertise. That technology had been rationed out in such a fashion that, while the Posleen had been
stopped, casualties among the inadequately equipped human forces had been horrific. The Darhel
always insisted this had been unavoidable and due to logistical issues, but no one could miss that the end
result was a loss of eighty percent of the human race and nearly a century of the remainder being used as
mercenaries and pawns, while those "relocated for safety" during the war had wound up as scattered
refugees assimilated into alien societies, with a near total loss of their human thought processes. The
Darhel, of course, had graciously helped humanity rebuild and resettle Earth, at "reasonable cost," said
cost being set by the Darhel. It was not a history to inspire trust. Nor had they actually shared technology
тАФmost of what humans had acquired had been reverse engineered from the little that had survived the
war.
In the end, of course, it had turned out to be a grievous mistake on the part of the Darhel. They
should have either left humanity to its own devices or dealt with it fairly. When it became clear that they
had done neither, humanity's response had been . . . human. Some of the Darhel had survived the
sporadic programs of extermination practiced by the survivor states. Some.
This Darhel was pale and translucent of skin with cat-pupilled eyes. Most had green or purple
irises, this one's were purple with a bare turquoise tinge at the edges. His face was typical of Darhel,
narrow and reminiscent of a fox's. His hair resembled that of humans and was the usual silvery black
rather than the metallic gold tones seen more rarely. "Gold" and "silver" regarding Darhel hair meant
exactly what the words said; the hair was not blond. Darhel had pointed ears that tended to twitch under
stress, and sharklike teeth. They didn't smile much. They looked, in fact, like classical fantasy Elves. This
one wasn't twitching in stress, and bore a practiced closed-lip smile of greeting. By its eyes, the smile
could mean anything . . . or nothing.
To make matters worse, the Darhel wore gunny's stripes. The question was, had he earned them
from politicking, as a reward to his Shylock skills, or the hard way, from operating in the field? Almost
unnoticed amid the other shocks, he wore the badge of a sensat above his left pocket.
After thousands of years of striving, humans were finally starting to make actual strides in
extrasensory perception. The military, especially, had started using them for a variety of purposes. Very