"John Ringo - The Legacy of the Aldenata 7 - Watch On The Rhine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

Boom . . . Boom . . . and they were reduced to charred, bloody scrap.

The road and the town littered with ruined fighting machines and dead
and dying men, the soldier, the commander, withdrew to refuel and
rearm. The Seventh British Armored Division had been stopped cold by a
single tank, more importantly, by a single man's will and daring. Soon,
the commander would return with reinforcements to finish off the point
of their armored spear.

Though he had a month more to live, it was on this day, by this obscure
town, that Michael Wittmann entered immortality.

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***
In the recent past:

Though the smoke in the room came not from tobacco but from incense
burnt upon the Altar of Communication, and though shimmering
tuniclike garments covered the beings attending the meeting, and even
though those beings were elfin, with pointed ears and needlelike teeth,
any human corporate CEO would have recognized instantly that here was
an assemblage of unparalleled economic and political clout.

The beingsтАФthey were called "Darhel"тАФwere seated around the low
boardroom table. All were senior leaders of most of the leading clans
which formed that species. The table, a rare and precious iridescent
hardwood from a little known or settled planet, spoke well of the wealth
of the assembly. Each board member's chair was individual, crafted by a
group of Indowy master craftsmen to suit that member's size and body
shape alone. An Indowy servantтАФgiven the nuances of the galactic legal
and economic system one might as well have said "slave"тАФstood behind
each of the Darhel lords, ready to cater to their every need and whim.
Though some Darhel were perhaps aware of it, most were blissfully
unaware that these servants, never comfortable with their status as
slaves, were one of the prime sources of intelligence to the Bane Sidhe,
the galaxy-spanning plot to unseat the Darhel as lords of creation.

Holographic projections stood before each chair, visible to that board
member alone. Though information was available concerning things like
loss of life among the inhabitants, mostly the green-furred, humble
Indowy, of the planets falling one by one into the fanged maws of the
invaders, few Darhel cared to look at them. This was not squeamishness
on their part. The Darhel were simply indifferent to loss of Indowy life.
With eighteen trillion Indowy within the Federation, the loss of a few
billion, or a few hundred billion, was a matter of no moment.