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

you’d like to have your suit, so I hid it.”
Jack couldn’t force himself to look away. In any other time, from any other war, a Dominion Knight would have given
his soul to keep his suit.
But not this time. Not this war.
He stared in horror. He remembered the cold fear it had given him in his dreams to be wearing the suit again. And
wondered if the Milots did create berserkers, and if so, how? And wondered if the nurse had ever realized what she’d
done when she’d saved the suit, hidden it, and then given it to him.
A bird trilled outside the compound, reminding him of his new life. He swung the storage door shut. When he could
open it and look the battle armor in the face again, emotionlessly, he would know he was well.
Until then, he planned to find the man that had made a coward out of him, and kill the son of a bitch.


Chapter 2
The rehab tech looked down at his clipboard for the twentieth time during the interview, not to review what the screen
was telling him, but to hide his face, so that the man sitting across from him couldn’t read his expression. The tech was
scared. He’d been scared for the past seven months, when the hospital had discharged this man into his general care
at the rehab center. The man was a Knight—an idealist who’d been trained to fight the “Pure” war, and believed in it,
had even taken vows accordingly and lived, exercised, breathed by those vows. And the man had been betrayed on
Milos, like thousands of his brothers—and was a tracking time bomb because of it. Who did his superiors think he
was, a goddamn saint, that he could rehab a Knight? Thank god, the patient no longer had access to a battle suit, and
that the Knights had been disbanded years ago. Today’s armored infantrymen were just so much cannon fodder, and
the tech could deal with that. The computer screen blinked at him, reminding the tech that he was supposed to be
working on his client’s discharge.
“I don’t care where you reassign me, just make it somewhere I can be alone. I want to be alone.” Storm stared at the
wall and watched it form into a comforting hologram. He glared at it until the picture grew hesitant, and then returned
to wall.
The rehab tech said blandly, “There aren’t too many people as alone as you are.” He typed something into his
keyboard. “All right. I’ll recommend several occupations that go along with your background survey—but I’ll tell you
this, Storm—you don’t want to be alone. And when you realize that, you’ll have accomplished what I’ve been trying
to do these past seven months.” He stood up, staring at the stark expression of the sandy-haired man. A
forty-one-year-old mind inside a lean, twenty-two-year-old body—both of them harboring the lust for revenge and the
killer instinct of millennia-old homo sapiens.
Jack barely heard the tech leave. His thoughts, waking dreams, boiled over him. Storm stretched out his right hand,
tensed it so that the muscles ridged over the back of his hand, muscles that led to the smallest digit and ended
abruptly in a scar-smoothed absence instead of the little finger. He rubbed the edge of his hand. That was the finger
that had saved his life ... and plunged him into living hell.
He’d had it explained to him, oh, maybe a hundred times. By the doctor, the nurses, the rehab tech, the computer
monitor, and it still made no more sense than it had upon hearing it the first time.
He was the sole survivor of the Sand Wars. Oh, there were bound to be a few others—deserters mostly, hidden here
and there in the underground strata. But his cold ship was one of only three to have made it off Milos, and the only
one to make it past the Thrakian blockade, although that was undoubtedly when it sustained the damage which threw
it off course and eventually caused massive system failures. It had drifted then, powerless and off course, lost in the
outer lanes for seventeen years. And, inside, only his bay was functioning on auxiliary power ... all of the others had
gone dark, their occupants as dead as the ship in which they lay.
The doctors had no explanation for it. Somehow, he had roused when the power had gone off—roused enough to jam
his right hand against the interior of the bay, pushing the panel that would activate the emergency auxiliary power.
The action could have sprung the “coffin” lid and freed him, but instead it jarred the auxiliary power button and he was
plunged back into cryogenic sleep. The coincidence had saved his life ... and lost him his right little finger and three
toes to frostbite, a small enough price to pay, his doctors had told him.
If he had been freed, they doubted he could have lived for very long aboard the systems dead ship.