"Harrison, Harry - Bill, the Galactic Hero 7 - The Final Incoherent Adventure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

But the roboflacks on board the Heavenly Peace got their story into circulation and kept it there, and the citizens of the Empire, who knew little and cared less, figured that it must be true. There were even those very few who were dim enough to believe the endless flow of military propaganda.
So it was that the great fleet swooped down on the defense installations of Eyerack in wave after wave, in a massive surgical strike that would wipe out the entire defensive system of a planet without killing any civilians and maybe no more than 2.5 defenders. It was almost too good to believe.
But believe it people did, particularly Bill. He could see the evidence with his own eyes, right up there on the video screen - and video screens don't lie, do they? He was seeing the action first-hand, through the nose cameras of the smart missiles that were doing the work. The smart missiles that he, Bill, feeling he was soon to be a galactic hero twice over, was guiding with more than superhuman precision to their destinies.
The first wave of ships, with Bill in the tail of the lead, concentrated on Anti-Spaceship defenses. The vast armada swooped deep into the atmosphere of Eyerack and destroyed whatever weapons down there might hurt them. Thousands of gallant gunners like Bill risked the terrors of modern long-distance warfare - motion sickness, boredom, exhaustion, thirst, horniness - to protect their comrades from the terrible wrath of Eyerack.
One target after another popped red on Bill's screen, one missile after another was launched from the rectal tubes of the General's space spider. Bill's confidence in himself and his weapons systems - they were much too sophisticated to be mere weapons - grew with each direct hit. His first smart missile had hit the gun at which he'd aimed it, but soon he was trying for even greater precision. Now he was putting his missile right down the barrel of a gun, or swooping around from behind into the ammunition stores. And every time, as he had been told, the warning sirens of the incoming missile gave the gun crews time to get the bowb out of there.
Bill started to get giddy with his success. He sent his missiles into loop-de-loops and barrel rolls and Immelmanns, spelled out words with their tracks; he was really beginning to enjoy himself. After a while he even realized that he could use the nose cameras on his missiles to look around the battlefield at no danger to himself.
There was some danger to the missiles, of course. The Eyerackians, not realizing that the huge military force surrounding their planet had nothing but their best interests at heart, were doing their best to shoot down everything in the sky. They would try to shoot down the missiles, and sometimes they would even succeed. Bill hated that, because he needed to rack up as many points as possible. To get extra time so he wouldn't have to add any of his own quarters to the pile General Weissearse had given him. Sometimes the Eyerackian gunners would be shooting at something else, something Bill couldn't see on his screen. And sometimes, Bill started to notice, the soldiers at the guns didn't have any chance to run away when they didn't shoot down the missiles.
The nose cameras blew up with the missile, of course, so he never saw the explosions, but it gradually dawned on him that some of the Eyerackian soldiers were being blown up at the same time. Bill had been partially blown up a few times himself, and he felt a certain sympathy for the Eyerackians.
During a brief slow spell, he took one of his missiles on a little tour of the area. For the first time he could see the whole fleet, spread out across the sky like a patient etherized on a table. There were thousands of ships, ranging in size from scouts like the Heavenly Peace all the way up to dreadnoughts that were so big they couldn't come into the atmosphere. The smaller ships were attacking in waves, each wave led by a scout ship, holding them all in neat formations by remote control. Each of the larger ships released its own wave of bombers and fighters and flying missile platforms.
The missile platforms floated high up, over the action, lobbing missiles down through the clouds. The bombers charged straight in at their targets, surrounded by a buzzing sphere of fighters. As Bill watched, a group of fighters detached itself from one cloud and zoomed down to meet another group coming up from below. They were all dots from this distance, so he couldn't tell who was winning, but then a bomber exploded. Bill drove his missile down toward the airfield, which flashed red - AIRFIELD: 100 POINTS - just before he hit it.
This wasn't fair! Here the Empire was doing its very best not to kill anyone, and these vile Eyerackians were trying to kill Bill's buddies! In the back of his mind, Bill realized that he didn't really know any of those people, and that, after all, in the Troopers it was always bowb-your-buddy week. Also maybe the weeks of subliminal patriotic music had had an effect on him. Maybe even some of General Weissearse's sermons had sunk in while he was asleep. Maybe it even had something to do with the hypno-coils embedded in the chair. For whatever reason, now Bill was fighting mad.
Now he had a clear sense of mission. His job was to destroy anything that might harm his buddies, his pals, his comrades in arms. And, not incidentally, himself.
He knocked out another Anti-Space-Ship missile base, then obliterated an Anti-Aircraft-Artillery emplacement, then blew up an ammo dump, and destroyed some more AAA, and cratered an airfield, and, kicked some more ASS.
By now the Eyerackian defense command had alerted their troops, and the front of the attack wave was itself being attacked. Bill couldn't concentrate only on ground installations any more; he was using his lasers now to pick off missiles that were aimed at him! His chair was swooping and dodging and ducking and spinning and bobbing and weaving until Bill was glad the only food he'd had in weeks was the liquid nutrient gruel from the dispenser in the turret. Anything else would be all over his video screen.
There were no more slow periods. Bill was too busy shooting down attacking fighters and missiles, most of the time, to worry about where they were coming from. All he knew was that they kept coming. The only breaks he got were when he had to put in another quarter, and he couldn't risk taking very long with that. Fortunately, he was racking up enough points to keep the guns going for a long time.
Bill barely had time to think about how safe the General had promised this mission would be.
Now that he was mostly using the lasers, he had a sort of normal view to the rear. It was punctuated by arrows and flashing red signals and green halos around the ships of the armada, but it still showed him what was going on. And what was going on was that all hell was breaking loose.
The entire battle was being fought in the air, and it was moving around the planet at great speed. But it was still a battle.
Missiles were flying up toward the ships and down toward the ground and between the ships and the bombers and fighters of the fleet and the Eyerackian fighters. Laser beams crisscrossed the sky, burning or exploding or slicing up whatever they found. Sometimes a laser blast from one of the Imperial ships would slice open one of their own bombers while trying to intercept a fighter. Without the red and green markings on the screen, Bill would never have been able to tell what side anyone was on, and he sure hoped that the other attackers had a system like his. Even with it, sometimes his screen was just a big mass of red and green dots.
The sky was full of whizzing death. The Heavenly Peace, being in the lead of the attack, only had to worry about what was actually being aimed at her - although that was quite enough, thanks. The rest of the ships and planes were flying through a steady rain of shells and missiles and bullets and fighters and bombers and electronic chaff and debris. Mostly debris. The ships had repeller fields to take care of the smaller pieces of metal, but the planes were getting chewed up by left over chunks of bombs and missiles and shells and even other planes, chunks that were just as good as a bomb or a laser in tearing off a wing or plowing through a cockpit or a gun turret.
There was no way to tell anymore who was shooting whom. If a bomber - or, sometimes, an Imperial ship - went down, it might have been from Eyerackian fire, or Imperial fire, or just from running into junk.
It didn't matter any more. Bill wasn't paying attention to selected targets any more, either. Not even to his point totals (which were pretty low, because flying debris, no matter how dangerous, wasn't worth any points at all to the computer). He just shot everything that looked like it might be getting close to him.
And then suddenly everything was getting farther away.
It took a couple of minutes for Bill to realize that the Heavenly Peace had pulled out of the attack, back towards a planetary orbit. While his turret computer worked out his total score and bonuses for the day, General Weissearse popped up in a little mortise in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
The General had put a belt around his muumuu so it looked more like a standard uniform, although not much. He was standing in front of a hologlobe of Eyerack that had arrows and diagrams all over it, and an off-screen voice was saying, "...your favorite General and mine, troopers and journalists, here he is, Stormy Wormy Weissearse!"
There was a burst of applause from the recorded studio audience.
"Thank you, thank you," the General said. "As you know, our purely defensive and completely justified and morally pure attack on the godless heathens of Eyerack began just a few hours ago. All the operational details of the attack are, of course, absolutely secret and will remain so forever. But I can give you some idea of how the operation is going so far.
"Everything is just hunky-dory."
The screen went to a split screen. On the right was a shot of the reporters, who were jumping up and down like school kids, waving their arms and trying to get the General's attention, despite being on a different ship a million miles away. A trooper slipped a microphone in front of one of them and handed her a slip of paper.
"General Weissearse," she read, "to what do you attribute the overwhelming success of today's battle?"
"Of course, most of the credit has to go to me, as the creator of our brilliant strategic plan and leader of our gallant troops. And I suppose a weensy bit of it has to go to those brave men and women who are putting their lives on the line in this daring, yet completely safe, operation. But most of all, our victory is due to our faith in God, and God's faith in us as his instrument in chastising the atheistic warmongering rebels of Eyerack. All of our success is owed to the Lord. Hallelujah!"
Bill thought that maybe a little of the success was owed to all that practice he'd put in on the way here, but this news conference was a one-way broadcast.
Another reporter had been given a question to ask. "Were any of our brave warriors injured in the great battle?"
Bill was particularly interested in this one, since he had himself incurred a small blister on his trigger finger, and hoped for a Purple Kidney (the traditional medal for blisters, scratches, bruises, and paper cuts received in combat, and usually reserved for officers).
"I'm glad you asked me that," General Weissearse began. "As you know, there are millions of troopers involved in this great venture, and in any exercise of this magnitude a certain number of losses is inevitable. Every injured trooper is a tragedy, of course, and my personal staff will be sending my personal computerized form letter to the personal families of every trooper with a Class C-7 injury (Yucky Flesh Wound) or higher.
"Fortunately, it looks like we won't be writing any of those letters tonight."
Bill breathed a big sigh of relief. From what he'd seen, there was a strong possibility that some troopers might have been injured as high as Class A-2 (Completely Dead, No Parts Reusable; the only higher class, A-1, Complete Vaporization, was considered the same as Absent Without Leave, and was a court-martial offense). When a ship blew up in the atmosphere, as a bunch of them had, people were likely to be seriously injured after falling five or ten miles to the ground. Bill wasn't sure how this hadn't happened, but he was glad no one had been hurt badly.
The trooper with the microphone handed over another sheet of paper.
"What sort of punishment has been meted out to the disloyal and godless enemy?"
"Much less than they deserve," the General said. "Of course, we can have no detailed figures on enemy casualties, but we have utterly destroyed the Eyerackian Triple-A and have wiped out the ASS. Our intelligence reports tell me that there is so far only one confirmed Eyerackian fatality. This was an old man who was visiting his son's missile base as the attack began. The surprise and fury of our attack were too much for the old man, and his heart stopped. Even though we were not directly responsible for his death, I have sent a message of apology to his family.
"Now that the Eyerackian defenses have been obliterated, in the coming days we will concentrate our attacks on the factories where these vile people have been producing weapons of mass destruction such as we, ourselves, would never use. We will also be targeting the military facilities that support those factories, supplying them with raw materials, parts, electricity, food, and sewage treatment. And we will do this without inconveniencing the civilian population in any way."
Bill was amazed for a moment at the precision of his own video-controlled weapons systems, and even so he had a little trouble with the idea of bombing sewage plants and blowing up only the sewage from arms factories. But the subsonics and the hypno-coil kicked in, and the moment of doubt quickly passed.
The computer finally finished computing Bill's scores. They were pretty good, if you included the bonuses for not getting killed, but not enough to get into the top ten. They certainly weren't high enough to get that twelve-hour pass. Bill might have minded that more if there'd been somewhere to go on a pass, but on this ship there were no women, and the only places to go were the enlisted men's lounge and the mess hall. Since no one in either place would talk to him or give him a drink, he wasn't missing very much.
This was in any case much more interesting than the General's press conference. Bill was busily figuring out how many more points he could get if he didn't have anyone shooting at him when the General stuck his head into the turret.
Bill saluted with both hands and tried to get to his feet. He'd been sitting in that chair for a couple of weeks, though, and couldn't quite manage it. He fell back into his accustomed position, with the video screen before him. General Weissearse was taking another question from a reporter.
Bill looked back toward the door. General Weissearse was standing there, looking impatient and vaguely concerned. Bill looked back at the screen. The same General was there, explaining how the eleven seconds of videotape from a nose camera that they were about to see was absolutely typical of the millions of missiles fired.
"It's a miracle!" Bill screamed, and tried to fall to his knees.

CHAPTER 7