"Patrick Tilley - Amtrak 2 - First Family" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tilley Patrick)

emphasis was on group identity, group activity and shared facilities;
privacy, in the normally accepted sense of the word, was deemed to be
unnecessary; personal possessions were regarded as unimportant.


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Deke was different to the majority of Trackers at Pueblo who lived,
ate, fought, slept and screwed around in small, close-knit groups and
looked forward eagerly to the next overground sweep, or an incursion by
hostiles.

They needed that extra shot of adrenalin generated by




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combat to feel
fully alive. Deke had gotten the same buzz during his time on the
wagon-trains but his real kicks came from gazing upon sun-tinted towers
of cumulus, the dark menacing bulk of thunderheads, the delicate
tracery of alto-cirrus, teased out by the wind like the tails of horses
- one of the many extinct animal species. His four-hour solo stint in
the watch-tower had become very precious to him. He liked the
solitude, the privacy - even though neither word-concept was included
in the official Tracker vocabulary. The videotape, with its illegal
sound-track, was his alone; his most precious possession. The last
thing Deke wanted to see while on duty was a bunch of screaming
lumpheads.

An alert packed the tower with people and blew his chances of adding
another cloudscape to his collection.

Despite being a code-breaker Deke was still a good soldier. His leg
injuries had meant being downgraded to line-support status but he still
wore his TrailBlazer badge with pride. Mutes were still the enemy. He
had simply lost interest in body-counts shortly after glimpsing his
first sunrise. He'd gone on dutifully to do his share of killing and
had even made sergeant at the end of his second tour, but from that
first, glorious golden moment only clouds had counted. Indeed, it
became an almost fatal obsession. At the back of his mind lurked the
knowledge that, had he paid more attention to the ground instead of
looking at the sky he might not have led his squad into the ambush from
which only he had emerged alive.