"Robert Thurston - Falcon Guard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thurston Robert)

Clan officer always searched for the means to turn his defeats into virtues. A
downed 'Mech, no matter how damaged, was never entirely scrapped. Someone
somewhere would have a use for its remains. Nicholas Kerensky, he who had
created the Clans, had instilled in his followers the absolute necessity for
the severest economy measures. Nothing must be discarded until it had been
squeezed dry of any possible new use. And, Aidan had noticed, there always
seemed to be at least one more.

Warriors, too, wore out, for they were soon too old to fight. They often moved
to support positions, training

14 Robert Thurston

units, but failing that, these old warriors could still perform one more
service for their Clan. In many battle situations the commander's only hope
was to buy time by sending expendable troops into the fray. These warriors
willingly sacrificed their lives. Aging warriors were often organized into
such solahma units, then sent into the field for one last battle. Aidan
thought of Ter Roshak, the training commander who had so changed the course of
his life. Only weeks before, Roshak had given his life as a member of a
solahma infantry unit.

A sad fete, thought Aidan, for a valorous warrior. Ter Roshak had survived
heroically only to die as cannon fodder, an ignominious end. But perhaps
survival had been the man's fatal mistake. Aidan would sooner die in battle,
preferably in his BattleMech and while destroying both his enemy and his
enemy's 'Mech, than live to see his worth as a warrior used up.

Having served for twenty years, he, too, was edging toward being an old
warrior. Aidan was almost forty, an age when a warrior was supposed to be
considering his options as an aging member of his Clan. Fortunately for him,
however, there was a war on, a war the Clans had been living, dying, and
preparing to fight for centuries, ever since the Exodus of their ancestors
from the Inner Sphere after the fall of the once-glorious Star League. A Star
Colonel now, Aidan could conceivably rise to high command levels, become part
of the guiding forces of the long-awaited invasion of the Inner Sphere. That
would certainly add a few years to his usefulness as a warrior. But he knew
such ideas were mere delusion. Though he had legitimately earned all his
promotions to this point, including his Bloodname, he carried a taint as a
warrior that would let him go only so far as a warrior. His codex showed too
many black marks. There was, for one, the dark cloud over the means by which
he had earned warrior status. After Aidan had failed his first Trial of
Position, Ter Roshak had schemed, even murdered, to give him an unprecedented,
and illegal, second chance at the trial to become a Clan warrior, one of the
highest honors to which any eligible young trueborn could aspire. The second
taint involved Aidan's posing as a freeborn, the false identity he'd assumed
for his second trial. The freeborn stigma still clung to him even after

FALCON GUARD 15