"Jack McKinney - Robotech 07 - Southern Cross" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

with Dana kneeling on them. Instructors or cadre who treated her like just one more trainee found
that they had a bright if impulsive pupil; those who gave any hint of contempt for her parentage
found that their rank and station were no protection.
Cadet officers awakened to find themselves hoisted from flagpoles...a cadre sergeant's
quarters were mysteriously walled in, sealing him inside....The debutante cotillion of the
daughter of a certain colonel was enlivened by a visit from a dozen or so chimps, baboons, and
orangutans from the academy's Primate Research Center...and so on.
Dana reckoned she would fit into the 15th just fine.
She realized with a start that she didn't know where Bowie was going. She felt a bit
ashamed that she had reveled in her own good fortune and had forgotten about him.
But when she turned, Bowie was looking up the row at her. He flashed his handsome smile,
but there was a resigned look to it. He held his hand up to flash five outspread fingers-once,
twice, three times.
Dana caught her breath. He's pulled assignment to the 15th, too!
Bowie didn't seem to be too elated about it, though. He closed the other fingers of his
hand and drew his forefinger across his throat in a silent gesture of doom, watching her sadly.

The rest of the ceremonies seemed to go on forever, but at last the graduates were
dismissed for a few brief days of leave before reporting to their new units.
Somehow Dana lost Bowie in the crush of people. He had no family or friends among the
watching crowd; but neither did she. All the blood relatives they had were years-gone on the SDF-
3's all-important mission to seek out the Robotech Masters somewhere in the far reaches of the
galaxy.
The only adult to whom Dana and Bowie were close, Major General Rolf Emerson, was
conducting an inspection of the orbital defense forces and unable to attend the ceremony. For a
time in her childhood, Dana had had three very strange but dear self-appointed godfathers, but
they had passed away.
Dana felt a spasm of envy for the ex-cadets who were surrounded by parents and siblings
and neighbors. Then she shrugged it off, irritated at herself for the moment's self-pity; Bowie


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was all the family she had now. She went off to find him.
Even after three years in the Academy, Bowie was a cadet private, something he considered
a kind of personal mark of pride.
Even so, as an upperclassman he had spacious quarters to himself; there was no shortage of
space in the barracks, the size of the class having shrunk drastically since induction day. Of the
more than twelve hundred young people who had started in Bowie's class, fewer than two hundred
remained. The rest had either flunked out completely and gone home, or turned in an unsatisfactory
performance and been reassigned outside the Academy.
Many of the latter had been sent either to regional militias, or "retroed" to assorted
support and rear-echelon jobs. Others had become part of the colossal effort to rebuild and
revivify the war-ravaged Earth, a struggle that had lasted for a decade and a half and would no
doubt continue for years to come.
But beginning with today's class, Academy graduates would begin filling the ranks of the
Cosmic Units, Tactical Air Force, Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, and the other components of the
Southern Cross. Enrollment would be expanded, and eventually all officers and many of the enlisted
and NCO ranks would be people who had attended the Academy or another like it.