"Bova, Ben - Orion 05 - Orion among the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

Then I wondered, If the planetary survey did not detect that this clearing was a swamp, if the scouts did not know that there are dangerous carnivores down here, how accurate is Intelligence's estimate of the enemy's strength and capabilities? It was not a pleasant rumination.
Sergeant Manfred rotated the perimeter guard every twenty minutes, giving each trooper about forty minutes' rest. He did not seem to sleep much. I had been built to need hardly any sleep at all. Had he been given the same strength? Could he control every part of his body consciously, even the involuntary nervous system, as I can? Could he slow down his perception of time when the adrenaline flowed, so that in battle his enemies seemed to move in slow motion? Could any of them?
I wondered about that until I saw him finally grab a catnap after the third set of guards relieved the second shift. No, Manfred needs sleep as much as the rest of them. He does not have my talents. None of them do. They are simply ordinary men and women, bred from cloned cells and trained to be nothing but soldiers.
After an hour the whole squad assembled and we glided through the forest toward the rendezvous point I had selected, the bulky equipment packs bobbing behind us. The trek was pure hell. It was hot and sweaty inside our suits, but when some of the troopers took off their armor, biting insects swarmed all over them. They put the armor back on, but the insects stayed inside their clothing, feasting on their flesh. It would have been funny, watching them trying to scratch themselves inside their armor, if they had not been so miserable.
The wounded were even worse off. As they floated in their flight packs, they moaned endlessly. One of the sergeants bawled them out in a vicious, half-whispered snarl:
"You whining bunch of mutts, you'd think your guts had been pulled out the way you're screeching. What are you, troopers or sniveling crybabies?"
"But Sarge," I heard one of the troopers plead, "it's like it's on fire."
"I've got four decorations for wounds, Sarge," another said, "but this is killing me."
Every centimeter of the way, as we groped through the dark forest, with the insects buzzing in angry clouds about our heads, the wounded troopers cried and begged for something to stop their pain.
Then we ran into the squad led by Lieutenant Frede, the unit's medical officer. Her wounded were whimpering and groaning just as badly as my squad's.
"I can't really examine them on the move, sir," she said to me. "Can we stop for ten minutes? And may I use a light to see their wounds properly?"
The enemy was supposed to be halfway around the planet. But what if there were other nasty surprises in this forest, like the swamp things that had tried to eat us? I glided among the trees in silence for a few moments, weighing the possibilities. Frede hovered at my side.
"All right," I said, my mind made up. "Ten minutes. Keep the light shielded."
I went with her as she examined the first trooper, a woman whose forearm had been cut when one of the swamp monsters punctured her armor.
The wound was crawling with tiny red ants feasting on her torn flesh. Frede jerked back with surprise as the ants, obviously bothered by the light, began burrowing into the woman's skin. The trooper screamed, whether in pain or fright I could not tell.
I took off the armor from my own injured leg and saw that the ants were chewing away. One of the drawbacks of inhibiting pain signals is that your body can no longer warn your brain of its danger.
Frede swallowed hard, then went to work on the wounded troopers. She had to flush out the ants with liquid astringents that burned so badly the troopers yelped and howled with pain. I stayed silent when my turn came and received admiring glances in the darkness of that tortured night.
It took more than ten minutes, but not much more. Frede was quietly efficient, once she got over her first shock of discovery. But as we powered up the flight packs again and started to glide forward through the trees, she said to me, grim-faced, "I hope those ants haven't laid their eggs under the skin."
A pleasant thought.
"I'll have to examine all of you once we set up base camp," she said.
We pressed on to the rendezvous point. The giant trees rose all around us in the pitch-black night like the pillars of a colossal darkened cathedral, but their lowest limbs were dozens of meters above the hummocky, leaf-littered forest floor. There was hardly any vegetation on the ground, only an occasional low-lying bush or shrub and thin grass. The high canopy of the lofty trees blocked sunlight very effectively, I realized, preventing much foliage from growing at ground level.
So we drifted through the massive boles of the trees like two squads of ghosts gliding through the sinister night. Muttering, complaining ghosts; clouds of biting insects still hounded us. At least the wounded stopped their whimpering once Frede got rid of the vampire ants. Now and then one of the equipment packs bumped gently into a tree or got wedged between two trunks and some of us had to go back and move it away, then find a wider avenue for it. After nearly two hours of this stop-and-go we finally reached the rendezvous point.
One of the other squads was already there, and the fourth showed up shortly after we did. Once Frede attended to the other wounded, I called a meeting of my lieutenants, leaving the noncoms to direct the checkout of the equipment packs and to make certain we had not lost any. The rest of the troopers began setting up our tents.
All three of the officers shared an uncanny resemblance. They were all about chin-high to me, and had broad, high-cheeked faces with clear blue eyes; they looked enough alike to be brother and sisters. In the dim light of our field lamps I saw that they even had nearly identical sprinkles of freckles across their noses. The army must have cloned them from the same genetic stock.
Lieutenant Frede, my medical officer as well as a squad leader, seemed levelheaded and not given to panic. Yet she looked plainly worried.
"Two of my troopers died," she said as she took off her helmet. The same short-cropped sandy brown hair as the other two lieutenants. "I haven't been able to do much more than give them a superficial look-see while we were on the march here, but it seems to me that the wounds those monsters inflicted on them were not serious enough to be fatal."
"Then what killed them?" I asked.
Swarms of insects whined all around us. She slapped at them. We were all scratching and trying to wave the bugs away.
"I think those swamp monsters must have injected a toxin into the wounds," Frede said, scratching inside the collar of her tunic.
"Poison?"
She nodded. "Poison. Which means that our other wounded may have been poisoned, too."
"Is there any indication—"
She did not let me finish my question. "The wounded are more sick than hurt. I think they've been injected with toxin. They seem to be getting sicker by the minute. Maybe those damned ants are poisonous, too."
I thought about that for a moment.
"I notice, sir," she added, "that you were wounded in the leg. How do you feel?"
"Fine," I said. Then I added, "My immune system produces antibodies very quickly."
Another nod. "Then may I recommend that we take a sample of your blood and use it to transfuse the antibodies into the wounded men?"
"Yes, of course. Good thinking."
So while the troopers began to assemble our transceiver and the dawn slowly lightened the leafy canopy high above us, I lay down on a cot in Lieutenant Frede's medical tent and let her draw blood from my arm.
"Thank you, sir," she said, holding up the syringe filled with bright red blood.
I sat up and rolled down my sleeve. "If you need more, let me know."
"This should be sufficient, sir."
I got to my feet. The tent's bubble shape was barely tall enough for me to stand without stooping in its center. Four cots with sleeping wounded in them filled most of the floor space; the lieutenant's examination table and other medical equipment were arranged along the outer edge.
Frede stood up also and gave me a critical examination with her sky blue eyes. "You're not one of us, are you?"
"One of who?"
"The regular officer corps. You're from a different gene stock. You're bigger, darker hair and eyes, even your skin coloration is more olive than ours. Are you a volunteer officer?"
I made a rueful smile. "No, Frede, I'm not a volunteer."
She broke into a sly grin. "Then somebody at headquarters must be worrying about our sex lives."
"What?"
"According to the duty roster, you and I are paired for the duration of this mission. It'll be my first time with someone outside of our own clone group."