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

He was heir to the ignominious title of sole survivor of the most disastrous defeat of Dominion Forces since their
formation. Jack smiled grimly at this, aware that he was no doubt being monitored from the other side of the wall,
beyond the holograph. He wondered what they thought about him—his tense smiles at nothing at all. His inability to
sleep a night through without waking, panic-stricken, six or seven times. His determination to stay solo, alone, a
survivor.
The Thrakians, he’d been told, had stopped conquering almost as suddenly as they’d started, leaving behind a
crescent-shaped path of destruction—once verdant planets turned into seas of sand by war and alien terraforming.
No, not sand. Jack stretched his hands in front of him on the table, aware even as he thought, that the rehab tech was
reporting to a superior, and decisions were being made that would determine the course of the rest of his life—or so
they thought. Once he was free....
Not sand. It looked like sand. Moved through the gloved hands of his battle armor like sand. Flowed. Grit floated on
the air when flung. Hot. Dry. Dusty. But not sand, exactly. They knew now that it was filled with microcosms. Tiny
organisms that stayed dormant until the Thrakians planted their young, and then went to work.
The Thrakian League had decimated eight solar systems in order to create nests for their grubs. Warm, sand-filled
nests. And why they stopped there, no one knew. It certainly wasn’t because the Dominion Forces had defeated them
at Milos. Nor had they been defeated at the Stand of Dorman’s Colony, Storm’s home planet.
No, the Thrakians simply stopped because they’d wanted to, and for the last fifteen years, there had been uneasy
treaty between the League and the Dominion. Uneasy because none of the Dominion scientists could predict when, or
if, the swarming would occur again—or how to stop it if it did.
It was already too late for Storm and for Storm’s family, long dead, though freshly mourned.
Breaking off his thoughts. Jack looked up at the wall. “Hurry up,” he said. “I want to get on with this.”
On with what? With saving the universe from the Thrakian menace? He laughed humorlessly at himself and leaned
back into the form-fitting chair. It made minor adjustments to his lanky form. He did not sit in a chair so much as he
conquered it.
The conference room door sprung aside to admit the rehab tech. He threw a motley looking gray jumpsuit onto the
table, where it slid until it halted in front of Storm. He picked it up with his nine fingers and spread it out to read the
insignia.
“A Ranger.”
“That’s right. You’ve got your wish, Storm. You’ve been assigned to Claron, one of the Outward Bound planets. Not
too much going on there ... mining and the supportive trade for that. You’ll be gathering a data base on the planet
itself.”
“I’m not a xenobiologist.”
“No, but you had some background training in it, before you volunteered.” The rehab tech gave a thin smile, matching
the sparseness of his brown hair. “The government can’t afford a specialist for every backwater planet. But if you
want to be alone, that’s the place to go. I’ve ordered a packet of background tapes for you.”
“How soon can I leave?” Storm lowered the suit, curling it toward his chest, a subconscious protective gesture that
the rehab tech noted.
“Day after tomorrow.”
For the first time in weeks, the veteran smiled, and the happiness reached his washed-out blue eyes.
And in the Claron morning, the echo of that smile touched his eyes again. He threw his pack over the skimmer and
lashed it on, listening to the redtails courting in the sky over the compound. Their raucous chatter could only lure
another redtail, and that was the way it should be. They swooped overhead toward the forest beyond and
disappeared, with a chorus of wild, hysterical giggles.
Storm fit into Claron. He fit better than even his rehab tech could have guessed, and in ways he never could have
predicted. The mining syndicates that made up the boomtowns operated within an unwritten code of environmental
protection ... one that he felt comfortable with. They had a purity to their industry, a code, that perhaps only someone
like himself could understand. The plains were filled with obsidite, worth crossing space to pull out, and worth doing it
right.
The only trouble he’d had in all his months of work was with a local brewery, Samson’s Ale. Claron boomrats had a
liking for the malt crops ... a liking that put them on the list for extinction.