"Mike Moscoe - The First Casualty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moscoe Mike)

equipment, even a jet cart?"

"God, those things are expensive. Even the Navy can't af-
ford 'em. Though I'd love to have one."

Inez's grin dripped admiration for the culprits. "You
may. Each company of the First of the Eighty-eighth has
one platoon heavy with miners. All three weighed in
heavy at boarding but not enough to complain about." She
paused for a moment. "You remember how tickled Comm
was to get all those extra channels. It was an old miner,
pulling boards from a 'damaged parts' box, that got them
for us."

Captain Anderson raised an eyebrow. "You didn't tell
me."
"Sir, a good exec doesn't bother her boss with the de-
tails."

"What else haven't you bothered me with, Izzy?"

"I wish I knew. There's a shitpot of stuff out there, and
I've only scratched the surface. Despite the rumors, I am
only human and rarely can be in more than three places at
once."

4 • Mike Moscoe

Anderson ignored the humor; today he needed an exec
who could be in a dozen places at once. Scowling down at
his command display, he shook his head. He'd fought the
coming battle hundreds of times in his forty-year career—on
the computer display-
Now he was fighting it for real, and it was going wrong in
ways even the craziest umpire would not have thrown at him
in a war game. Why had a picketboat been waiting for them
the moment they jumped into this worthless system? Why
was a major colonial force reacting in only seventy-two
hours?

He'd expected problems on his side. Lasers were miss-
ing parts; power plants were missing cables; crates were
miscoded, misplaced, or just plain missing. Most of his
grunts were ransacking containers, chasing the critical
parts he needed to get the central defenses up. Without
them, the colonials could land smack dab in the middle of
his base crater. He'd expected time to work all this out.
Only one platoon from each company had been shoved
forward to block the three cracks in the crater wall.