"Simon Hawke - Time Wars 05 - The Nautilus Sanction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

had risen from the deep. Sailors prayed and watched the sea with fear.
 The entire division had been called in for the briefing. Every single temporal adjustment team was in
attendance save the ones clocked out to Minus Time on missions. The briefing room on the sixty-third
floor of the Temporal Army Headquarters Building at Pendleton Base was packed and buzzing with an
undertone of conversation rife with rumors. Moses Forrester was not the sort of division commander
who routinely called the troops out for mass briefings, so there was a great deal of speculation about the
reason for the muster. Rumors circulated about everything from a new security evaluations program to a
battery of proficiency examinations for the Time Commandos ordered by the Referee Corps. In the
Temporal Army, such things were known as “mickey-mouse,” a term whose origins were lost in military
antiquity.
Lucas Priest, Forrester’s exec with the rank of major, spotted Finn Delaney near the front of the
briefing room and made his way to him. Slender, very fit and elegantly handsome, Priest walked with a
slight limp, favoring his left leg. The plasma burns he had received on his last mission to Minus Time had
completely healed, but there was still considerable soreness there. He wore a black patch over his right
eye. His real eye had been melted right out of its socket by the heat wave from an auto-pulser blast. He
was fortunate. He had only lost an eye and sustained serious burns upon his face. A direct hit from an
auto-pulser would have cooked his head off. Cosmetic surgery had restored his features to their original
appearance and the doctors had replaced the hair he lost, but Lucas had chosen a bionic optic unit
instead of an organic eye replacement. It was superior to a natural eye in a number of ways, but he had
not yet had it long enough to grow accustomed to it. Using it together with his natural left eye for more
than half an hour gave him a slight headache.
“Finn,” he said, touching Delaney on the arm, “you know what this is all about?”
Sergeant Major Finn Delaney turned to face him with a frown. Massively built, the red-haired
Irishman somehow always managed to look less like a non-corn than like a technician in his uniform. No
matter how sharply creased, and they rarely were, his black base fatigues always looked like workmen’s
coveralls when he wore them. He never buttoned up his blouse all the way, and more than one officer
had learned the hard way that Sergeant Delaney had a tendency to back up his recalcitrance with his
fists. In any other outfit, Finn would long since have become a casualty of military regulations, but
Forrester valued a soldier’s performance in the field above all else. His frequent, grudging intercessions
on Finn’s behalf kept him from being drummed out of the corps, although they did not prevent his being
busted down to private time and time again. It was a never-ending cycle. Finn would return from a hitch
in Minus Time and his exemplary performance would result in a promotion, but sooner or later, he would
run across some officer who had not been advised to steer clear of him. The result was usually an injured
officer and Finn’s being busted down to private once again. He was still a sergeant major only because
the members of the Temporal Army officers’ corps, in the interests of self-preservation, were learning to
give him a wide berth. In that respect, Finn Delaney epitomized the nature of the Time Commandos. The
regular troops respected them tremendously, but rarely socialized with them. Forrester’s people had a
reputation for being mavericks, more than a little crazed.
“Do I know what this is all about?” said Finn, looking at Lucas with surprise. “Hell, I was going to
ask you. You’re the exec, I figured you would know.”
Lucas shook his head. “Not me. You seen Andre?”
“Right here,” she said, from behind him. “What’s going on?”
Biologically, Andre Cross was the youngest member of the First Division, with the rank of corporal.
Chronologically, however, she was by far the oldest, having been born in the 12th century, where she
once held the rank of mercenary knight. She was not pretty. Her features were plain and somewhat on
the sharp side, yet there was something about them that was very striking. Her hair was straw-blond and
she paid an absolute minimum of attention to it, less than most men. She wore it a bit longer than most
soldiers did, partly because she had worn it short for many years to aid in her passing as a male in the
time from which she came. She filled out her uniform quite well, but with muscle rather than soft, feminine
curves. Her shoulders were quite broad and her biceps, when flexed, had a surprising peak to them. Her