"Allen, Roger Macbride - Allies And Aliens 1 - Torch Of Honor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

I got out of the seat and moved to the end of the car, the other passengers looking at me oddly. The two soldiers flopped down on the seat I had vacated.
"That's a lot smarter, boy," said the one who had spoken before. He pointed at a patch on the wall of the car that partially hid what looked like a scorched laser burn. "Don't want no more holes or bloodstains on these nice trains, do we?" The two of them laughed loudly. The other riders studiously ignored the whole scene. The soldier waved the back of his hand at me in dismissal and spat on the immaculately clean carpet.
The train eased to a smooth halt at the next stop, and I got out at once, before I did something angry and stupid, something that would get me burned down in my tracks and waste all the effort that had gone into getting me there. It was close, nonetheless.
A fellow passenger got off with me, and as the train pulled out, he touched my arm and spoke in rapid Finnish I had trouble following. "Be more cautious and careful, friend. Do not throw your life away over their childish mocking. Tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, will be the time to fight them. Die today and you cannot fight them tomorrow." He nodded and limped away, disappearing behind a turn in the path. The trees that hid him from view were burned and blackened, and the sidewalk was shattered before me.
Yesterday had been a time of fighting, too.
For the rest of the night and the beginning of the following morning, I wandered over the surface of Vapaus. I saw a good deal, but learned no more than I already knew. Here was a world not simply conquered, but brutalized. Soldiers were everywhere, shoving past pedestrians, sauntering down walkways, cursing and insulting the Finns. Vapaus's night life centered around the cluster of towers by the side of the central sea, and here the soldiers were out in force, grabbing produce from streetside stalls, "impounding" and guzzling stock from a liquor store, shouting vulgarities after young women.
The soldiers never travelled alone. From the hatred I saw in the eyes of the Finns, I doubted if even the soldiers who travelled in pairs were all that safe.
I took a look at a map posted at one of the rail stations and found that the hospital was in a tower near the central sea. The next part of the plan Joslyn and I had cooked up called for being near a hospital, so I rode the train one last time, crossing the central sea as the artificial sun started to brighten directly overhead. The water was a fantastic sight from the bridge. From a perfectly flat plane below me it swooped into the sky like a single titanic wave frozen over the curve of the world. All along its coastline were craggy inlets, small sandy beaches, and narrow fjords. Here and there were the wrecks of brightly colored pleasure boats, but the sea itself was empty. I left the sea behind and walked from the train to a spot about a hundred meters from the hospital, in the burned-off remnants of a small park.
I took the tiny tranquilizer capsule from my pocket and swallowed it. I walked on as casually as I could, waiting for the pill to hit. It did, like a load of bricks. I fell to the littered sidewalk.
The drug was a depressant as well as a relaxant. It dropped my body temperature and slowed my heart to a crawl, enough to scare the hell out of anyone who came upon me.
The pill wore off a few hours afterwards, but I slept on. The snooze I had had in my tunnel the night before hadn't been very restful.
I awoke in a clean, private hospital room, according to plan. The nurse who watched me was tall and slender, with short blonde hair and grey eyes. She saw I was awake and pointed a pocket laser at my forehead.
This was not according to plan.
She spoke good English, with a slight lilting cadence. "You are a very bad spy, did you know? No Finn is allowed to carry a laser, but you won't have the chance to report my having this one here. Your drug was so obvious it made our doctors laugh. Your head Guardians think you can get into the hospital without our noticing things like that? What did you think getting here would do for you?"
There was one bright spot. As Joslyn and I had figured, the hospital staff had been allowed to remain at work after the fighting, in the face of the many casualties. We had hoped to find a staunch group of underground workers here, both because it was one place that Finns would be allowed to remain in an organized group, and because the doctors and nurses would get a firsthand look at the Guardians' murderous handiwork.
It seemed we had figured right. Now all I had to do was convince my nurse here not to drill a hole in my skull.
I asked her a question, in very bad Finnish, trying to keep calm. "Is this room bugged?"
It startled her. She replied in Finnish that was too fast for me to follow easily. Don't believe the ads for the hypnotape courses-you don't become fluent, no matter how long they tell you to stay under. Especially Finnish.
I waved my arms to stop her. "Please! Go slow. My Finnish is not good."
Her forehead furrowed, and she repeated herself, talking more slowly. "What do you care if the room is bugged, Guardian? It would be your friends listening." She grinned malevolently, an unpleasant change for her pretty face. "As a matter of fact, they think they are listening to this room. We changed a few wires here and there, however. They will be listening to what they think are your noisy snores."
Good. At least I could talk freely. But something occurred to me. "How do I know you're not a-a Guardian?"
No one under a hundred years old should be able to look that angry. Her finger got a little closer to the trigger. "Okay, okay." I had slipped back into English. I switched to Finnish and said, "Never mind. I'm convinced."
She sneered at me. "You don't convince me, fool. If you want to spy on us here, at least send someone who speaks Finnish like a good Finn."
"I'm not a spy! I work with your side."
"Nonsense! We have no record of you. You are not from here. I'm beginning to lose patience with you, spy."
If this was her version of patience, I was in deep trouble when she got annoyed. "I'm from the League! The League of Planets! They sent me!"
She snorted. "And your starship is docked at the airlock complex next to the Guardian troop transports?"
"Terrance MacKenzie Larson, Commander, Republic Of Kennedy Navy, attached to LPSS 41, Joslyn Marie. ROK Navy ID four niner eight two four five."
A hint of doubt showed in her, and the laser lowered just a hair. I thought she was beginning to believe me. "You lie," she said after a moment's hesitation. Well, maybe not yet. "If you are from the League, why didn't you show yourself three months ago when these monsters descended on us?"
"I have been in-or on, or whatever, this world less than 20 hours."
"What did you do to get in? Use your own private airlock?"
I began to lose patience myself. "As a matter of fact, yes."
At that, she burst into laughter. "Spy, you are very bad," she said through the last of her giggles. "You are very, very bad at whatever it is you are trying to do."
I sighed and flopped back down into the bed-and noticed the view out the room's large picture window.
Spread out before me was the rearward end of Vapaus: I could see the cliff I had descended, and had the feeling I could pick out my route down.
I turned to the nurse, who was still smirking at me. "Could you bring me a pair of high-power-oh, what is the word-binoculars!"
That almost set off the giggles again. "But, spy, don't most spies carry their own?"
"Look, lady, you can sit there and laugh at me, or you can get the binoculars. If you get them, I will show you my private airlock. If you don't, you won't get to see it."
"You are wasting my time. But so this nonsense will stop, I will humor you and call your bluff. Then we can get to what it is you are really doing."
"Fine. Great. Just get the field glasses."
Keeping the gun pointed at me, she pushed the talk button on the room's intercom and spoke rapidly and quietly into it. Then she sat back down and we waited without speaking for a few minutes.
A big, burly man in an orderly's uniform came in carrying a pair of binoculars. Without a word, he handed them to the nurse, who gave him the laser. He pointed it at my heart instead of my skull. Not much of an improvement.
She tossed the binoculars onto the bed. I reached down and handed them back. "No, you look."
Coming no nearer than she had to, she picked them back up. "Where do I look?"
"Do you know where Roos Place is?" That was the street I had walked onto when I had gotten to the bottom of the cliff. I congratulated myself on remembering the name.
"Yes."
"Good. Now, find it with the field glasses, then look directly behind it at the aft cliff. Okay?"
"Yes."
"Move straight up the cliff until you're about halfway between the cloud cover and the axis." She did so, and I watched her as she looked over the cliff, stopped, and moved back down a bit, as if she had seen something worth looking at. "Now. What do you see?"
"Some sort of hole in the rear cliff. Right at the top of it is some sort of glint, like off metal." Her voice was shocked. I seemed to have convinced her.