Читать книгу The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 57

PFC Aiden Garroway could scarcely move. He had a little bit of wiggle room inside his 660-battlesuit, but the embrace of his Ship Assault Pod made any real shift in his position impossible. His confinement was beginning to gnaw at him. He’d been sealed in here since 1700 hours, long before the Skybase had even made its translation. Two and a half hours, now.

Worst of all he couldn’t scratch. There was a point midway up his back, below his shoulder blades and on the left, that had been tingling and prickling for the past hour, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Theoretically, he could have used his system nano to anesthetize the spot—a process that happened automatically if he was wounded—but so far his thought-clicks hadn’t done a damned thing. In fact, when he tried to isolate the itch in his mind, it moved, shifting one way or another until it was impossible to really pin it down.

The failure of the anesthetic release probably meant the sensation was purely psychosomatic, but that made it no easier to bear. In any case, he’d experienced worse. In boot camp, any unauthorized movement or wiggling when the recruit platoon had been ordered to hold position, had been punished by a session in the sand pit, taken through a grueling set of exercises by a screaming Gunny Warhurst or one of the assistant DIs.

At least Warhurst wasn’t going to reach him in here, sealed away deep in the belly of Samar’s launch bay. His former DI was in another SAP, possibly right next door, but as helplessly cocooned as was Garroway.

At least he had the squad data feed to keep him from going completely nuts. An open window in his mind showed an animated schematic of the tacsit, centered on Samar, with the Lejeune, Thor, and Morrigan spread across several thousand kilometers of empty space, and with the fighters farther out yet.

By pulling back on the viewpoint within his mind, the Commonwealth squadron dwindled to a bright, green dot, and he could see the icon representing the stargate falling in from the right. Pulling back still more, he could see the icons representing the enemy; zooming in on that tightly grouped pack of glowing red icons revealed seven capital ships just visible in a pale, red fog representing the radiation belts around the system’s gas giant. All seven vessels were evidently in orbit about the giant, and gave no indication that they were aware, yet, of the presence of the small Commonwealth squadron.

But they would be.

Garroway kept turning inward, inspecting closely his own emotions. He wasn’t sure about what he was looking for. Fear? Anticipation? Excitement? Impatience?

Maybe he was feeling something of all four. Boot camp had taken him through so many simulations of combat he couldn’t begin to number them. In virtual reality simulations he’d sat inside the close, unyielding embrace of an SAP many times, until he knew exactly what to expect—the long wait, the gut-punching jolt of launch, the sweaty palmed anxiety of the approach, the strike, the penetration, the entry.

Except that, he knew very well, you could never know for sure what was coming. Simulations were just that, simulations, and the real world was certain to contain more than its fair share of the unexpected.