"Charles Ingrid - The Sand Wars 02 - Lasertown Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ingrid Charles)

CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO




PART I

CHAPTER ONE
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No suit, no soldier. It’s as simple as that.” The bullet-nosed D.I. looked
down the row of men who sat before him, their shoulders bare and sweaty
against a too white sun. “We can hand you a laser rifle, but you’ll never be a
soldier.”

It was not really as simple as that. It never was. Still, the men sat there,
covered in alien dust, and listened to the D.I. One, a man not-old and
not-young, shivered involuntarily, feeling naked under the Malthen sun, for
he hadn’t been out of his armor much in the last six weeks. His skin, also
too white, began pinking rapidly. They’d been shucked out of their armor
after days on patrol, drilled and exercised while their equipment had been
racked and taken away.

Young men, not much older than boys, flanked him on either side, their
gazes intent upon the drill instructor. But Jack Storm had been in this
situation before and though his jaw tensed along with the others, he didn’t
quite feel what they felt. He’d mustered up good enough to wear battle
armor years ago—now he only wondered if he was good enough to join the
Emperor’s personal guard. And unlike the others sitting in the rows in front
of and behind him, he wasn’t here out of any patriotic sense that he owed
his service to the Emperor. On the contrary. He felt keenly that the Emperor
owed him.

He was twenty years older than most of them. His body didn’t show it
though, for he’d spent seventeen of those years adrift in cryogenic
suspension. As he sat cross-legged in the courtyard and listened to the D.I.’s
voice bounce off the incredible, forty-foot-high walls that surrounded them
there on the parade grounds, the sweat dripped off his lean body and
puddled to the ground. His sandy colored hair slicked back darkly. His high
cheek-boned face was tanned, to the neckline, for the recruits only wore
their helmets half-time, and the Malthen sun was quick to darken their skins
any time they were exposed to it.

Jack squinched his pale blue eyes closed for a second, shutting out
everything. As quickly, he opened them, not liking what he’d felt for that
fraction of a second. The dead blue-black sleep of cryogenics, cradling him,
killing him, for seventeen years… He reminded himself that there were days
when that curse was almost a blessing. A forty-odd-year-old body wouldn’t
have made it through the last six grueling weeks.