"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 10 - Paying The Piper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

and you can worry about the damage to your cursed deck without me to watch you. Do you
understand?"
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Two more spacers were squeezing through the maze of vehicles and equipment in the hold, carrying a
power tool between them. This sort of problem can't have been unique toFencing Master .

Huber put his hand on Deseau's shoulder. "Let's get out of the way and let them fix this, Sarge," he said,
speaking through the helmet intercom so that he didn't have to raise his voice. Shouting put people's
backs up, even if you didn't mean anything by it except that it was hard to hear. "Let's take a look at
Plattner's World."

They turned together and walked to the open hatch. Deseau was glad enough to step away from the
problem.

The freighter which had brought Platoon F-3, Arne Huber's command, to Plattner's World had a
number rather than a name: KPZ 9719. It was much smaller than the vessels which usually carried the
men and vehicles of Hammer's Regiment, but even so it virtually overwhelmed the facilities here at
Rhodesville. The ship had set down normally, but one of the outriggers then sank an additional meter into
the soil. The lurch had flung everybody who'd already unstrapped against the bulkheads and jammed
Fencing Master in place, blocking two additional combat cars behind it in the hold.

Huber chuckled. That made his head throb, but it throbbed already. Deseau gave him a sour look.

"It's a good thing we hadn't freed the cars before the outrigger gave," Huber explained. "Bad enough
people bouncing off the walls; at least we didn't have thirty-tonne combat cars doing it too."

"I don't see why we're landing in a cow pasture anyway," Deseau muttered. "Isn't there a real spaceport
somewhere on this bloody tree-farm of a planet?"

"Yeah, there is," Huber said dryly. "The trouble is, it's in Solace. The people the United Cities are hiring
us to fight."

The briefing cubes were available to everybody in the Slammers, but Sergeant Deseau was like most of
the enlisted personnel—and no few of the officers—in spending the time between deployments finding
other ways to entertain himself. It was a reasonable enough attitude. Mercenaries tended to be
pragmatists. Knowledge of the local culture wasn't a factor when a planet hired mercenary soldiers, nor
did it increase the gunmen's chances of survival.

Deseau spit toward the ground, either a comment or just a way of clearing phlegm from his throat.
Huber's mouth felt like somebody'd scrubbed a rusty pot, then used the same wad of steel wool to scour
his mouth and tongue.

"Let's hope we capture Solace fast so we don't lose half our supplies in the mud," Deseau said. "This
place'll be a swamp the first time it rains."

KPZ 9719 had come down on the field serving the dirigibles which connected Rhodesville with the other