"Charles Ingrid - The Sand Wars 06 - Challenge Met" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ingrid Charles)

had not worried—but she did.

She worried that whatever chance Jack'd had to go through imprint and
come back the man she loved grew slimmer by the day.




Chapter 5
 «^»
He was whole again. Young and eager, though the core of him was ice as if
he were chilled down—but he couldn't be, he had never been, and the army
wouldn't risk cold sleep on a raw recruit… too expensive. He'd gotten here
on his own hook, and now he was here, and in, with a spindly, potbellied
NCO bellowing at him—

"No suit, no soldier! If you hear it once, you'll hear it a thousand times.
Those of you who made it through Basic to get to us—you ain't done yet!
We're going to winnow you again because only the best get to wear armor
and you don't look like the best to me. Do you?"

"NO, SIR!"

"But if I make you the best, and the ones of you who make it through my
camp are the best, and I do it not because I like you but because it is my job
to give the best to the Knights, then you'll be good enough to wear the armor.
And if you're good enough to wear the armor, then you'll know you're the
best because there isn't anybody else on God's green lands good enough to
tell you you're the best! Your ass is going to depend on that suit once you
earn it. I'm going to teach you how to wear it, use it, eat, sleep, and shit in it,
and repair it. You will treat nothing as well as you treat your armor, not
even your mother! Do you understand, boys?"

"YES, SIR!"

His mother. Jack caught a glimpse of memory, of his brown-haired,
freckle-dusted, sad-eyed mother, looking across a field of shadow and sun
toward him, waving good-bye… and he remembered. He won the armor
and lost Milos… and the Thraks devoured his own planet as they had half a
dozen others, and her bones undoubtedly lay covered by Thrakian dust,
unmourned until now.

He would have cried, but he was too cold to cry and the tears would have
frozen anyway.
 Pepys looked up briefly from his web of com links, his red hair drifting in
its own cloud of electricity. He damped down the transmit as Vandover
shifted impatiently, waiting to claim his attention. "What is it?"

"The lab says Storm will be coming out of imprint shortly."