"Smith, E E Doc - D'alembert 09 - Omicron Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)
"As to your terms, I will agree to give you custody of all Gastaadi worlds we manage to take from them, if there are any. You and the Gastaadi probably deserve one another. The number of worlds you'll get will depend on any final peace settlement we make with the enemy . . ."
"Then I must be a party to all treaty negotiations," Lady A interrupted. "I won't have you dealing away my worlds haphazardly just so you can have some peace."
"Agreed," Edna said without hesitation. "As for your ships, however, they will fight as part of the Imperial Navy. They will coordinate their efforts with my high command and they won't initiate any actions without Navy approval. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly," Lady A nodded. As long as she was getting her way in the important things, she was willing to concede minor points. "I can have my fleet assembled in three days, prepared for battle. I presume you'll want my ships to rendezvous with the Navy for concerted action."
Von Wilmenhorst cleared his throat and entered the conversation for the first time. "As I recall, milady, the last time some of our ships tried to rendezvous with some of yours, it was a trap and the area was mined."
Unruffled, Lady A shrugged. "Khorosho, if you don't feel you can trust your ally in so vital a matter, you can pick the coordinates for the rendezvous. It makes little difference to me. I'd suggest, though, that you pick a site near the border of Gastaadi territory so we can take appropriate action as soon as our fleets are integrated."
"We'll be in touch," Admiral Benevenuto said. Lady A nodded and broke the connection. Her face vanished from the triscreen, but the force of her presence continued to be felt in the chamber.
"Let's finish this briefing as quickly as possible," the Empress told her two advisors. "I want to go take a long bath. Dealing with that woman makes me feel slimy all over."
***
Decisions were made, plans were drawn up, orders were given. The enormous and delicate machinery that was the Imperial Navy began to gear up for the first real war in its history. Heretofore the Navy had dealt only with pirates and rebels; now it would face the true test of meeting an outside force superior in some ways to itself.
Some of the Navy's ships were at the other end of the Empire, simply too far away to make a timely rendezvous before the attack against the Gastaadi must occur. Their task would be to spread themselves throughout the Empire, serving as guardians to the other worlds should the main fleet meet with catastrophe. They would probably not be able to defeat the Gastaadi forces en masse, but if the enemy were to invade deeper within the Empire its fleet would necessarily have to spread thinner and the Navy ships left behind would have more of a chance against the diluted armada.
Other ships were in dock for repairs. While some were only due for routine maintenance and were ordered to join the main fleet, some were totally out of commission. Repair crews were ordered to work around the clock to get those vessels in shape for future fighting.
They were not told why this was necessary: as far as they knew it was merely to prepare for an unscheduled series of war games. Edna did not want to alarm her people prematurely, since there was nothing as yet the common people could do but worry. The only people who would be told the true situation were the personnel aboard the ships that would do the actual fighting-and they would hear the news only after they'd reached the rendezvous point, when there was no chance of word leaking out and panicking the populace.
Captain Fortier requested a billet somewhere within the fighting fleet, and was granted a post on the flagship as part of Lord Admiral Benevenuto's evaluation team. He had to leave in such a hurry that he had no chance to say goodbye to Helena in person; they had to settle for a hurried and awkward conversation over the communicator circuits.
At Helena's invitation, Yvette came down to Earth to spend several days with her friend. Helena took a well-earned vacation from her work at the Service and the two women spent much time in each other's company talking about many things. They compared their personal dealings with the notorious Lady A and Yvette related her adventures on Omicron, revealing the shame she'd felt at being controlled so thoroughly in the slave camp. Helena verified that the helplessness was similar to nitrobarb, which she herself had experienced on the planet Sanctuary.
The night before the battle was to begin, they sat out on the balcony of Helena's penthouse apartment, looking up at the darkened sky. Not many stars could be seen through the ambient light of metropolitan Miami, but the brighter ones glimmered peacefully, giving no indication of the fierce battle that was to come. The women looked for the spot where the fight would be, but it was currently in the daytime hemisphere. They would never have been able to see anything there anyway; light from that region would take centuries to reach the Earth. Still, they would have liked to look at the spot where the fate of the Galaxy might well be decided.
"I'm sorry about Jules," Helena said, broaching a subject they'd both avoided until now. "He was pretty special to me; I can only imagine how much he meant to you."
"Merci. We spent all our lives together, growing up and working for the Circus. Even though we knew one or the other of us might get killed in action at any time, I still feel like I've lost half myself. I love Pias very much and it sounds odd to say this, but I don't think I'd miss him quite this much if he were taken from me. I've known him for only a few years: Jules has been there all my life." Yvette took a thoughtful sip of the orange juice Helena had provided and stared up at the night sky.
"We might've been sisters now," Helena said. "I could have loved Jules very much, if he'd let me. That was a particularly gallant thing he did, discouraging me from the start. A lot of men might have strung me along for awhile till they'd gotten what they could. He was too honest for that."
"Honesty was a big part of it," Yvette admitted. "There was also the fact, as he pointed out at the time, that the physiological differences between one-gee and three-gee natives make intermarriage hazardous at best-plus the fact that your father was our boss, which would have caused no end of problems. And anyway, he and Vonnie were engaged since their teens; it really was a love match there.
"He did tell me," she added in confidential tones, "that he regretted having to make the choice. He did find you very attractive and he liked you since our first meeting, up there on the Headquarters roof." She looked sadly at Helena. "It's a shame no other men you found worthwhile shared his good taste."
"Now that you mention it, Paul Fortier did propose to me-but it was the night Lady A came to visit, and so many important things have been happening I didn't want to mention it to anyone."
"I hope you said yes," Yvette said.
"Of course. I'm no fool. Now that I look at it logically, I can see that Paul has a lot of the same traits as Jules -strong, good-looking, intelligent, dedicated, adventuresome. They even have the same physique, because Paul's family came from DesPlaines a couple generations back. Since he was raised on a one-gee world, though, that's no problem. Yes, Paul and Jules have a lot in common, including . . ."
She turned and looked straight into her friend's face. "I don't want that to happen, Yvette. I don't want to lose another man I love. I don't want to be alone again."
The two women held onto one another for solace long into the night under the calm, uncaring gaze of the stars.
CHAPTER 13
Visit to a Very Small Planet
When Jules left the alien scoutship to knock out the blaster emplacements, he knew he would not be returning to it. He'd been in enough dangerous situations to know the odds against him. He had to make four passes at four heavily armed units. With his skills, he could probably make one; with luck, a second. Three would take a miracle, and four-he didn't even want to think about it.
Even if he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations, he knew the ship wouldn't wait for him. If Yvette had been in charge she might have taken the gamble-but with Lady A flying the scoutship, there was no chance at all. She and he had been enemies too long, ever since they first locked eyes in Bloodstar Hall years ago. He'd been useful to her on this mission, but that use had come to an end. Now she would be just as happy to see him dead and out of her hair. The scoutship would take off the instant Lady A was familiar with the controls and Jules had knocked out the last blaster emplacement. He had no misconceptions about that, which was why he'd bowed to the inevitable and ordered them to go anyway.
Still, he had a job to do-and with typical d'Alembert determination he was going to see it through either to its end or to his own. Climbing back into the copterbus, he started the controls and the big machine took off on its hazardous mission.
The first emplacement was almost too easy. Steering, as he was, a labyrinthine path between the parked spaceships, he was able to approach the site from an unexpected direction. His carefully hurled grenade struck right near the power unit of the heavy-duty blaster, creating a massive explosion that totally annihilated the big gun and its crew. The ensuing shock wave bounced the copterbus around on the violent air currents, and Jules had to pause momentarily to steady his craft before he could continue.
That pause gave the other heavy-duties a chance to get him in their sights, and Jules found himself having to dodge maniacally through a crossfire of energy beams, any one of which could spell destruction. The one advantage he had was that these weapons had been designed for shooting at spaceships, and a target as small as his copterbus was much harder to find. Still, he had to pilot his craft with the abandon of a lunatic as he continued along his course.
The intensity of the blaster fire only increased as he neared the emplacement on the east side of the landing field. Throwing the copter into a brief dive, he leaned out his hatch and tossed the second grenade. His aim wasn't quite as accurate as the first time, but it was close enough to achieve the desired results. With barely a backward glance at the havoc he'd wrought, Jules slued his craft around and headed for the southern emplacement.
He'd cut down his opposition now by a third, but the two remaining batteries fired on him with renewed determination. He was feeling lightheaded from his efforts, and knew it was an effect of all the adrenalin pumping through his body. He deliberately focused his attention on the blaster at the southern end, reminding himself sternly that it only took one hit to knock him out of the sky.
That hit came a bare instant later, as a beam from the southern emplacement sliced through the tail rotor of his copter. He fought the controls to try a quick adjustment, but the same beam continued through and nearly severed the entire rear of his vehicle. After that, everything was chaos. The copter was like a wild beast under his hands, bucking and rolling uncontrollably.
Jules knew he couldn't keep the copter in the air much longer, but he might have some choice in the matter of where it crashed. He'd knocked out two emplacements so far; if he could eliminate a third, the scoutship might still have a reasonable chance to escape successfully. He'd use the copter itself as a weapon against that third blaster site.
The southern emplacement was almost below him, still firing in his direction-but the unpredictability of the copter's motion made it as hard for the gunners to aim as it was for Jules to control. With almost nothing but sheer willpower, Jules directed his craft into a steep dive aimed precisely at the battery of blasters. This time he had the force of gravity on his side, pulling the copter downward at the proper angle to do maximum damage.
With his craft on a collision course, Jules unstrapped himself from the pilot's seat, opened the hatch beside him and leaped out into empty air with all the DesPlainian strength he could muster. Behind him, the copterbus continued its suicidal plummet directly at the blasters, hitting them with an explosion that equaled those of the first and second emplacements together. An enormous ball of orange flame rose into the sky, followed moments later by a column of thick black smoke.
Jules himself had no time to appreciate the aesthetics of his actions. He was falling freely through the air with the ground rising to meet him. His body shared the downward speed of the copter at the time he'd leaped from it, modified slightly by the vector of his jump. All his thoughts were directed toward a safe landing and avoiding instant death on impact.
To a person from a three-gee planet, objects on a one-gee world seemed to fall in slow motion, just as objects on the Moon seemed to fall slower to someone accustomed to Earth's gravity. A fall from a great enough height could still be fatal, though. Jules had to use his quicker reflexes and his acrobatic skills to avoid such a fate.
As he approached the hard ground he tucked his knees up under his chin, forming himself into a compact ball. He was all prepared to hit the ground and roll, absorbing the momentum of his fall the way he and Yvette had done so many times at the climax of their circus act. He might have made a perfect landing, but for the fact that the fireball from the copter's crash rose into the sky just as he was about to land. The concussion of the blast knocked him slightly sideways along his intended path, and even with his reflexes there was no time to readjust.
He landed and rolled as he intended, but a sharp stab of pain seared through the left side of his body. He cried out in agony and flopped over on his side, lying still on the damp ground. His left leg was throbbing with waves of pain that made thinking impossible. For several minutes he lay helpless on the grass, gasping for breath and trying hard to fight his way through the pain back to clear thought again.
A dull roar sounded far off and Jules opened his eyes, squinting against the bright artificial lights the aliens had turned on. From this angle the world looked upside-down and strange, and not a little blurry, but he could make out the shape of the scoutship taking off into the sky. The one remaining blaster emplacement was firing at the ship with all its power, but that wasn't enough to penetrate the scoutship's sturdy shields. Within seconds the vessel had zoomed safely out of sight into the upper atmosphere and the reaches of space beyond.
Jules closed his eyes again as more waves of pain washed over him. He'd done as much as he could to ensure the success of the mission. If he were to die now, it would be with the knowledge that Earth had been warned about the alien menace. In fact, as he lay on the ground in pain, he almost wished some of the aliens would come along to find him and put him out of his misery. At least it would stop the pain in his leg.
But several minutes passed and no aliens came, and Jules's instincts for survival reasserted themselves. He was alive, albeit with one injured leg, and life to a d'Alembert meant action. If he could get away from this area, there was a chance he could make it to one of the cities and join up with a band of the freedom fighters, as he'd told Yvette he'd do. His duty to Earth wasn't over yet, not as long as there was a chance he could help liberate Omicron from its oppressors. There was still work for him to do.
But he couldn't do it lying here. The aliens probably thought he'd been killed in the copter crash, and they were preoccupied with putting out the fires his attacks had caused, but that state of affairs wouldn't last forever. He couldn't just lie here on the ground and expect not to be seen. Bad leg or not, he had to reach some safe place to hide before he was discovered.
Rolling over onto his right side he propped himself up on his elbow and gingerly felt down along his left leg. He hadn't heard anything snap when he landed and the pain, though agonizing, felt more like a sprain than a break. He made the tentative diagnosis of a sprained knee. He wished he had something to wrap it with to prevent swelling, but the only material on hand was the jumpsuit he was wearing, and it was too tough to tear into strips. He would have to let the sprain heal along its own course, even though he knew the throbbing pain would be tremendous.
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