"Lawrence Watt-Evans - War Surplus 01 - The Cyborg And The Sorcerers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

upon impact; he switched back to the nose camera and watched as the blasters came into play. He
wondered how much damage they would have done if they had a range of more than twenty meters.
Finally there came the sound of his own voice, the launch, and the ground falling away again.

"Shut it off." He opened his eyes and glared at the blue chameleon fur. "Why did you do so much
damage?" He suspected that, if anything, the computer's damage estimate was low—perhaps very low. It
assumed that buildings had steel frames rather than stone arches, and that people knew enough to take
shelter—and had somewhere they could go to take shelter.

"Standard procedure for assault on enemy position."

"Why didn't you just nuke the city and have done with it?"

"Use of nuclear weapons would have aborted rescue of cyborg unit and resulted in termination of cyborg
unit without justification."

"Well, that's something, anyway."

"Query: Advisability of resuming attack, using nuclear weapons."

"I don't think so. It'd be a waste of a warhead, and we haven't got very many. They can't do us any more
harm. Besides, it would negate any propaganda value my warning had, and it's possible that we might
want to try dealing with them again later, when they've had time to clean up." He was getting better at
making up excuses for not killing people, he thought

"Affirmative."

An idea occurred to him. "Hey, did anything out of the ordinary happen during that attack? Any systems
malfunction, or inexplicable diversions from course?"

"Negative. No resistance of any sort encountered."

Then the wizards hadn't been able to do anything against the starship. He wondered if they'd had the
chance to try. "Not even small-arms fire?"

"Negative."

They hadn't even used his submachine gun. His ship had been shooting at completely defenseless people.
He was not at all happy about that The war was over; he shouldn't be killing anybody.

After a moment's consideration, he asked, "Now what? On to the next system?"

"Negative. Gravitational anomalies representing enemy weapons research not yet fully investigated."

That was what he had feared. "We can't go back to Teyzha for a while; I'd be killed on sight"
"Affirmative."

"Do we just wait here in orbit, then?"

"Negative. Other locations show similar levels of gravitational disturbance."