Veteran

Начало книги

The soldier’s environment is mud. It doesn’t matter where they go. Tundra, woods, jungle, even paved colonial suburbs, by the time a few thousand tanks, walkers and armoured personnel carriers have tramped through it, once the defoliants have been sprayed, all that’s left is mud.

What we terraform we can still destroy. It’s why all the colonies look the same to me. It’s also how I knew I was dreaming; I couldn’t taste the mud, couldn’t smell it. This was more like watching a viz. My dreams were becoming less real than my time in the sense booths, but what was another loss?

It had been a forest once. You could still see the rotted stumps of alien trees pushing up through the plain of mud. Defensive trenches ran across the plain in a way that was probably supposed to be planned but looked utterly random to me. The harsh burning brightness of Sirius A was sinking beneath the horizon; even from the fourth planet it looked huge and too near for a sun to someone who’d grown up on Earth. Behind us the much smaller Sirius B was rising, casting its pale twilight light.

Читать дальше →