"Hogan, James P - Voyage from Yesteryear" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)
"What do' the ' seismics and Sniffers say about Swyley's decoys?" Colman asked, turning his head toward Driscoll.
Driscoll translated the question into a computer command and peered at the data summary on one of the compack screens. "Insignificant seismic above threshold at eight hundred yards. Downwind ratio less than five points up at four hundred. Negative corroboration from acoustics-background swamping." The computers were unable to identify vibration patterns correlating with human activity in the data coming in from the sensing devices quietly scattered around the gorge by low-flying, remote piloted "bees" on and off throughout the night; the chemical sensors located to the leeward of the suspected decoys were detecting little of the odor molecules characteristic of human bodies; the microphones had yielded nothing in the way of coherent sound patterns, but this was doubtless because of the white-noise background being generated in the vicinity of the stream. Although the evidence was only partial and negative at that, it supported Swyley's assertion that the main road down to the objective was, incredibly, virtually undefended for the time being.
Colman frowned to himself as his mind raced over the data's significance. No sane attacking force would contemplate taking an objective like that by a direct frontal assault in the center--the lowermost stretch of the trail was too well covered by overlooking slopes, and there would be no way back if the attack bogged down. That was what the enemy commander would have thought anyone would have thought. So what would be the point of tying up lots of men to defend a point that would never be attacked? According to the book, the correct way to attack the bunker would be along the stream from above or by crossing the stream below and coming down from the spur on the far side. So the other side was concentrating at points above both of the obvious assault routes and setting themselves up to ambush whichever attack should materialize. But in the meantime they were wide open in the middle.
"Alert all section leaders on the grid," Colman said to Driscoll. "And open a channel to Blue One."
Sirocco came through on the compack a few moments later, and Colman summarized the situation. The audacity of the idea appealed to Sirocco immediately. "We'd have to handle it ourselves. There isn't enough time to involve Brigade, but we could pin down those guys on the other side while you went in, and roll a barrage in front of you to clear obstacles." He was referring to the Company controlled robot batteries set up to the rear, below the crest line of the ridge. "It would mean going in without any counter battery suppression when you break though. What do you think?"
"If we went fast, we could make it without." Colman answered.
"Without CB suppression there wouldn't be time to move any of the other platoons round to back you up. You'd be on your own," Sirocco said.
"We can use the robot batteries to lay down a close cover screen from the flanks. If you give us an optical and IR blanket at twelve hundred feet, we can make it."
Sirocco hesitated for a split second. "Okay" he finally said. "Let's do it."
Ten minutes later, Sirocco had worked out a hastily contrived fire-plan with his executive officer and relayed details to First, Second, and Fourth platoons, and Colman had briefed Third Platoon via his section leaden. Colman secured and checked his equipment; unloaded, reloaded, and rechecked his M32 assault cannon; checked and inventoried his ammunition,
As soon as the first salvo of smoke bombs burst at twelve hundred feet to blot out the area from hostile surveillance, the Third Platoon launched itself down the , trail toward the denser vegetation below. Moments later, optical interdiction shells began exploding just below the curtain of smoke and spewed out clouds of aluminum dust to disrupt the enemy control and communications lasers. Ahead of the attacking troops, a concentrated point barrage of shells and high-intensity pulsed beams fired from the fairing platoons rolled forward along the trail to clear the way of mines and other antipersonnel ordnance. Be. hind the barrage the ,Third Platoon leapfrogged by sections to provide mutually supporting ground-fire to complete the work of the artillery. There was no opposition. The defending artillery opened up from the rear within ten seconds of the initial smoke blanket, but the enemy was firing blind and largely ineffectively.
In thirteen minutes the firefight was all over. Colman stood on the gravel bank of the stream and watched as a bewildered major was led from the enemy bunker, followed by his numb staff, who joined the gaggle of disarmed defenders being herded together under the watchful eyes of smirking Third Platoon guards. The primary objective had been to take prisoners and obtain intelligence, and the crop had yielded two captains in addition to the major, a first and a second lieutenant, a chief warrant officer, a sergeant major, two sergeants, and over a dozen enlisted men. Moreover, the call-sign lists and maps had been seized intact, along with invaluable communications and weapons-control equipment. Not a bad haul at all, Colman reflected with satisfaction.
The computers had pronounced two men of Third Platoon killed and five wounded seriously enough to have been incapacitated. Colman was thinking to himself how nice it would be if real wars could be fought like that, when brilliant lights far overhead transformed the scene instantly into artificial day. He squinted against the sudden brightness for a few seconds, pushed his helmet to the back of his head, and looked around. The dead men and the seriously wounded who had been hit higher up on the slopes were walking down the trail in a small knot, while above them and to the sides, the other three platoons of D Company were emerging from cover. More activity was evident farther away along the gorge in both direc-. tions as other defending and attacking units came out into the open. Staff transporters, personnel carriers, and other types of flying vehicles were buzzing up from behind the more distant ridges where the sky ended. Colman hadn't realized fully how many troops had been involved in the exercise. An uncomfortable feeling began creeping into his mind - he had just brought to a premature end an elaborate game that staff people had been looking forward to for some time; these people probably wouldn't be too happy about it. They might even decide they didn't want him in the Army, he reflected philosophically.
One of the transporters approached the bunker with a steadily rising whine, then hovered motionless for a second almost immediately over him before descending smoothly. Its rear door slid open to reveal the lean, swarthy figure of Captain Sirocco in helmet and battledress, still wearing his flak-vest. He jumped out nimbly while the transporter was still six feet above the ground, and ambled up to Colman. Behind his ample black moustache, the easy-going lines of his face betrayed as little as ever, but his eyes were twinkling. "Pretty good, Steve," he said without preamble as he turned with his hands on his hips to survey the indignant scowls from the captured "enemy" officers standing sullenly by the bunker. "I don't think we'll get any Brownie points for it though. We broke just about every rule in the book." Colman grunted. He hadn't expected much else. Sirocco raised his eyebrows and inclined his head in a way that could have meant anything. "Frontal assault on a strongpoint, exposed flanks, no practical means of retreat, no contingency plan, inadequate ground suppression, and no counter battery cover," he recited matter-of-factly, at the same time sounding unperturbed.
"What about leaving your chin wide open?" Colman ~ asked. "Isn't there anything in the rules about that?"
"Depends who you are. For D Company all things are relative."
"Ever think of making a new seat for your pants out of part of that flak-jacket?" Colman asked after a pause. "You're probably gonna need it."
"Ah, who gives a shit?" Sirocco looked Up. "Anyhow, won't be much longer before we find out."
Colman followed his gaze. An armored VIP carrier bearing a general's insignia on its nose was angling toward them. Colman shifted his M32 to the other shoulder and straightened up to watch. "Smarten it up," he called to the rest of Third Platoon, who were smoking, talking, and lounging in groups by the stream and around the bunker. The cigarettes were ground out under the heavy soles of combat boots, the chattering died away, and the groups shuffled themselves into tidier ranks.
"On what did you base your analysis of the situational display, Sergeant?" Sirocco asked, speaking in a clipped, high-pitched voice mimicking the formal tones of Colonel Wesserman, who was General Portney's aide. He injected a note of suspicion and accusation into the voice. "Was Corporal Swyley instrumental in the formulation of your tactical evaluation?" The question was bound to arise; the image analysis routines run at Brigade would have yielded nothing to justify the attack.
"No, sir," Colman replied stiffly, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead. "Corporal Swyley was manning the compack. He would not have been assigned to ELINT analysis. He's color-blind."
"Then how do you explain your extraordinary conclusions?"
;'I suppose we just guessed lucky, sir."
Sirocco sighed. "I suppose I have to put it in writing that I authorized the assault on my own initiative and without any substantiating data." He cocked his head at Colman. "Happen to know anyone around here who makes a good pair of pants?"
"I guess he doesn't have a nose for the sweet smell of success," Colman murmured as they watched.
Sirocco twirled one side of his moustache pensively for a second or two. "Success is like a fart," he said. "Only your own smells nice."
CHAPTER TWO
A SUDDEN CHANGE in the colors and format of one of the displays being presented around him in the monitor room of the Drive Control Subcenter caught Bernard Fallows's eye and dismissed other thoughts from his mind. The display was one of several associated with Number 5 Group of the Primary Fuel Delivery System and related to one of the batteries of enormous hydrogen-feed boost pumps located in the tail section of the vessel, five miles from where Fallows was sitting.
"What's happening on Five-E, Horace?" he asked the empty room around him.
"Low-level trend projection," the subcenter executive computer replied through a small grille set to one side of Fallow's console. "Booster vee-sub-three's looking as if it's going to start running hot again. Correlation integral sixty-seven, check function positive, expansion index eight-zero."
"Reading at index six?"
"Insignificant."
Fallows took in the rest of the information from the screen. The changes that the computers had detected were tiny--the merest beginnings of a trend which, if it continued at the present rate, wouldn't approach anything serious for a month or more. With only another three months to go before the ship reached Chiron there was no cause for alarm since the rest of the pump-group had enough design margin to make up the difference even without the backup. But even so, there was little doubt that Merrick would insist on the primary's being stripped down to have its bearings reground, alignment rechecked, and rotor rebalanced again. They had been through that routine twice already in the three months that the main drive had been firing. That meant another week of working in near-zero g and klutzing around in heavy-duty protective suits on the wrong side of the stern radiation shield. "Bloody pump," Fallows muttered sourly.
"Since a pump is not an organic system, I presume the expression is an expletive," Horace observed chattily.
"Aw, shuddup." The computer returned obediently to its meditations.
Fallows sat back in his chair and cast a routine eye around the monitor room. Everything seemed to be running smoothly at the crew stations beyond the glass partition behind his console, and the other displays confirmed that all else was as it should be. The reserve tank to Number 2 vernier motor had been recharged after a slight course-correction earlier and was checking out at "Ready" again. All the fuel, coolant, primary and standby power, hydraulic, pneumatic, gas, oil, life-support, and instrumentation subsystems servicing the Drive Section were performing well within limits. Way back near the tail, the banks of gigantic fusion reactors were gobbling up the 35 million tons of hydrogen that had been magnetically ram scooped out of space throughout the twenty-year voyage and converting over two tons of its mass into energy every second to produce the awesome, 1.5-mile-diameter blast of radiation and reaction products that would have to burn for six months to slow the 140-million-ton mass of the Mayflower II down from its free-cruise velocity.
The ship had left Earth with only sufficient fuel on board to accelerate it to cruising speed and had followed a course through the higher-density concentrations of hydrogen to collect what it needed to slow down again.
Fallows glanced at the clock in the center of the console. Less than an hour before Waiters was due to take over the watch. Then he would have two days to himself before coming back on duty. He closed his eyes for a moment and savored the thought.
Only three months to go! His children had often asked him why a young man in his prime would turn his back on everything familiar and exchange twenty years of his life for a one-way journey to Alpha Centauri. They had good reason, since their futures had been decided more than a little by his decision. Most of the Mayflower II's thirty thousand occupants were used to being asked that question. Fallows usually replied that he had grown disillusioned by the spectacle of the world steadily rearming itself toward the same level of insanity that had preceded the devastation of much of North America and Europe and the end of the Soviet empire in the brief holocaust of 2021, and that he had left it all behind to seek a new start somewhere else. It was one of the standard answers, given as much for self-reassurance as anything else. But in his private moments Fallows knew that he really didn't believe it. He tried to pretend that he didn't remember the real reason.
He had been born almost at the end of the Lean Years following the war, so he didn't remember about that period, but his father had told him about the times when fifty million people lived amid shantytown squalor around the blackened and twisted skeletons of their cities and huddled in lines in the snow for their ration of soup and bread at government field-kitchens; about his mother laboring fifteen hours a day cutting boards for prefabricated houses to put two skimpy meals of beef broth and rice from the Chinese food ships on the table each day and to buy one pair of utility-brand pressed-paper shoes per person every six months; about his older brother killed in the fighting with the hordes that had come plundering from the Caribbean and from the south.
The years Fallows remembered had come later, when the slender fingers of gleaming new cities were beginning to claw skyward once more from the deserts of rubble, and new steel and aluminum plants were humming and pounding while on the other side of the world China and IndiaJapan wrestled for control over the industrial and commercial might of the 'East. Those had been stirring years, vibrant years, inspiring years. Fallows remembered the floodlit parades .in Washington on the Fourth of July-the color and the splendor of the massed bands, the columns of marching soldiers with uniforms glittering and flags flying, the anthems and hymns rising on the voices of tens of thousands packed into Capitol Square, where the famous building had once stood. He remembered strutting into a high-school ball in his just acquired uniform of the American New Order Youth Corps and pretending haughtily not to notice the admiring looks following him wherever he went. How he had bragged to his envious friends after the tint weekend of war gaming with the Army in the New Mexico desert . . . the exhilaration when America reestablished a permanently manned base on the Moon.
Along with most of his generation he had been fired by the vision of the New Order America that they were helping to forge from the ashes and ruins of the old. Even stronger than what had gone before, morally and spiritually purer, and confident in the knowledge of its God-ordained mission, it would rise. again as an impregnable sanctuary to preserve the legacy of Western culture from the corrosive flood 6f heathen decadence and affluent brashness sweeping across the far side of the globe. So the credo' had run. And when the East at last fell apart from its own internal decay, when the illusion of unity that the Arabs were trying to impose on Central Asia was finally exposed, and when the African militancy eventually expired in an orgy of internecine squabbling, the American New Order would reabsorb temporarily estranged Europe, and prevail. That had been the quest.
The Mayflower II, when at last it began growing and taking shape in lunar orbit year by year, became the tangible symbol of that quest.
Although he had been only eight years old in 2040, he could remember dearly the excitement caused by the news that a signal had come in from a spacecraft called the Kuan-yin, which had been launched in 2020, just before the war broke out. The signal had announced that the Kuan-yin had identified a suitable planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri and was commencing its experiment. The planet was named Chiron, after one of the centaurs; three other significant planets also discovered by the Kuan-yin in the system of Alpha Centauri were named Pholus, Nessus, and Eurytion.
Ten years went by while North America and Europe completed their recovery, and the major Eastern powers settled their rivalries. At the end of that period New America extended from Alaska to Panama, Greater Europe had incorporated Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and the Ukraine as separate nations, and China had come to dominate an Eastern Asiatic Federation stretching from Pakistan to the Bering Strait. All three of the major powers had commenced programs to reexpand into space at more or less the same time, and since each claimed a legitimate interest in the colony on Chiron and mistrusted the other two, each embarked on the construction of a starship with the aim of getting there first to protect its own against interference from the others.
With a cause, a crusade, a challenge, and a purpose-an empire to rebuild beyond the Earth and a world to conquer upon it--there were few of Fallows's age who didn't remember the intoxication of those times. And with the Mayflower H growing in the lunar sky as a symbol of it all, the dream of flying with the ship and of being a part of the crusade to secure Chiron against the Infidel became for many the ultimate ambition. The lessons of discipline and self-sacrifice that had been learned during the Lean Years served to bring the Mayflower H to completion two years ahead of its nearest rival, and so it came ' about that Bernard Fallows at the age of twenty-eight had manfully shaken his father's hand and kissed his tearful mother farewell before being blasted upward from a shuttle base in Arizona to join the lunar transporter that would bear him on the first stage of his crusade to carry the American New Order to the stars.
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