"Charles Ingrid - The Sand Wars 01 - Solar Kill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ingrid Charles)

“He’s locked into a debriefing loop. We’ll be lucky if he has any mind left at all.”
A scraping. Something scratching at his death mask....
“That’s enough chatter. Get the coffin open and get ready to plug him in ... god. Look at his feet. Frostbite. And his
hand. He’s set the auxiliary system off himself....”
“That’s impossible. He’s in cryogenic suspension.”
“When the power failed ... he may have come to enough to know there was trouble. He’s jammed his right hand
against the emergency panel. It’s the only thing that saved him. After he’s stabilized, check the other coffins. See if
any of the dead reacted as well. This man must be a born survivor....”
“Look at these suits.”
A distracted grunt, then, “Destroy them.”
“Destroy them? These are relics ... the black market....”
“You know the orders. Destroy them! Nurse, get your mask on and get ready. The coffin lid comes open ... now.”
Jack bolted up in his bunk. Sweat poured off his forehead and into his cupped hands. He took a deep breath, feeling
the darkness and the night sway around him. With that deep breath, he began to count down, sending his mind into a
hypnotic mode that he’d learned as second nature.
“And when he calmed, he told himself, “I’m awake this time. Awake and alive.”
As he dropped his trembling hands from his face, he looked at the clock, though he didn’t really need to. The graying
edges of the room told him it was nearly dawn,
He’d only awakened three times that night. Slowly, but surely, he was getting better. It wasn’t that his dreams
frightened him ... memories of the Sand Wars weren’t pleasant, but he could endure them. No, it was the stuff of
dreams themselves. The trap. Would he awake into reality or be ensnared again?
Jack put out a hand, reaching for the vial of mordil on his nightstand. It came up empty in his palm. He grimaced, then
threw the bottle away into the grayness. It clattered in the corner. Black market, the mordil hadn’t done much good,
anyway, though it had come guaranteed to give sleep without dreams. There was no telling how much the mordil had
been stepped on before getting to him. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. This night, it hadn’t. Not that
any of his doctors would have approved. Dreams were necessary, he’d been told, to keep a man sane.
He swung his feet over the edge of the bunk and listened to the sounds of Claron coming awake. The early morning
stir and tentative bursts of birdsong swelled in his hearing. Making his rounds in the virgin green forests of Claron
would do more for him than any mordil. Jack stood up and began to get dressed in his serviceable Ranger grays.
Before he left the station, he walked to a locked room and thumbed the door open. It was small, closet-like, and when
the storage door swung open, Jack felt the shock, like a physical blow, thump him in the chest.
His battle suit hung in drydock. Its mother-of-pearl form swayed off the meathook, the stirring of the air in the chamber
awakening it. It had the service markings painted on, though fading, and the even more garish personal markings that
the twenty-year-old rookie had illustrated for himself. And he looked at the crest, chosen by the innocent young
volunteer who could hardly wait to be a full-fledged Knight. Two years later, that rookie would be a veteran lieutenant,
abandoned to the Thrakians on Milos.
When the transporter had finally found them, he was the only one left at the bottom of the pit, but it didn’t seem to
matter, when he boarded the transport cold ship. Only one ship. It left three-quarters full, carrying the only survivors
of the Thrakian invasion of Milos. They’d been scraping them off the surface of Milos like so many squashed bugs ...
all that was left of the Dominion’s finest.
Nineteen years, three toes and one right little finger later, as he readied to leave the Veteran’s Hospital, the nurse had
very surreptiously presented him with a footlocker the night before his discharge. They had shared a lot of nights,
lately, and he’d had no suspicion this would be different. But the contents of the footlocker had sent him mentally
reeling.
“Don’t you like it?”
The Flexalinks winked at him, an obscene pearl from the bottom of the trunk.
“This ... this is my suit.”
“I know that.” She had hung onto his elbow, not noticing the tremble that ran through his body.
“They were all supposed to have been destroyed.”
She had smiled up at him. “I know. But this one’s yours. You survived, and I thought ... well, I don’t know. I thought