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“Reckon you’re right,” Daniels said. “Good Lord’s own miracle the whole train’s not on fire.” He looked at his hands. “Son of a bitch-I got the shakes. Ain’t done that since nineteen an’ eighteen, neither.”

Yeager looked at his hands, too. Now they were steady enough, but that wasn’t what he noticed about them: though night had come, he could see them clearly. The train might not have been set afire, but the northern horizon was ablaze. Two big cement plants in Dixon were going up in flames, and most of the rest of the town seemed to be burning, too.

The red flickering light showed Yeager more people scrambling out of the derailed train, and others standing in the cornfield like him and Mutt He looked down toward the locomotive, and saw at once why the train had overturned: the engine and the coal car behind it had tumbled into a bomb crater.

Mutt Daniels’ head made that same slow, incredulous traverse from north to south. “Saw this so’t of thing plenty of times in France. My grandpappy talked about what it was like in the States War. I never reckoned the U.S. of A. would get it like this, though.”

Yeager hadn’t started thinking about the whole United States yet. The ruined train in front of him was disaster enough to fill his mind for the moment. He started toward it, repeating, “We got to help those people, Mutt.”

Daniels took a couple of steps with him, then grabbed him by the sleeve and held him back. “I hear more planes comin’. Mebbe we don’t wanna get too close to a big target.”

Sure enough, a new drone was in the air, or rather several drones, like a swarm of deep-voice bees. They didn’t sound like the screaming monster that had bombed the track and shot up the train. “Maybe they’re ours,” Yeager said hopefully.

“Mebbe.” The drones got louder. Daniels went on, “Y’all can do what you want, Sam, but I ain’t gonna get out in the open till I see the stars painted on their sides. You get shot at from the air once or twice, you plumb lose the taste for it.” The manager squatted, ducked under the corn.

Yeager walked a little closer to the train, more slowly with each stride. He still wanted to rescue the people there, but Daniels’ caution made a solid kind of sense… and the closer those droning engines got, the less they sounded like the airplanes with which Yeager was familiar. He got down on his belly. If he was wrong to take cover, he’d cost himself and the injured people on the train a minute or two. But if he was right…

He rolled onto his side so he could look up through the corn-stalks’ bent green leaves. By the sound, the approaching airplanes were hardly moving: in fact, by the sound they weren’t moving at all, just hanging in midair. But that’s impossible, Yeager thought. Then he saw one of the aircraft, lit up against the night by Dixon’s burning cement factories.

The briefest glimpse told him it was no American plane. It hardly looked like a plane at all-more like a flying polliwog. Then Yeager noticed the spinning disk above it. His mind seized on the hovering gyros in Heinlein’s “If This Goes On-” But what were those flying marvels from a story set far in the future doing in here-and-now Illinois?

He found the answer a moment later, when they opened fire. The noise of the automatic guns sounded like a giant ripping endless sheets of canvas. He didn’t stick his head up to find out what had happened to the people standing in the cornfield. He just thanked his lucky stars-and Mutt Daniels-that he hadn’t been one of them.

Staying as low as he could, he crawled backward through the plants. He hoped their waving above him as he moved wouldn’t give him away. If it did, he hoped the end would be quick and clean.

He kept backing up, wondering all the while when he’d bump into. Mutt. Surely he’d retreated past where the manager had ducked down. “Idiot,” he muttered under his breath. If Mutt had an ounce of sense-and Mutt had a lot more than an ounce-he was getting away from the derailed train, too.

A couple of the gyros settled to earth, one on either side of the train. The one that landed on the eastern side happened to be directly in front of Yeager. His curiosity wrestled down his own good sense, and he stuck out his head far enough to peer out between the rows of corn: he had to know who was attacking the United States. Germans or Japanese, they’d regret it.

His vision path was so narrow that he needed most of a minute to get his first glimpse of an invader. When he did, he thought the soldier had to be a Jap-he was too little to be a German. Then Yeager got a better look at the way the figure by the train moved, the shape of its head.

He turned around and crawled through the corn as fast as he could go. He wanted to get up and run, but that would have drawn the invaders’ attention for certain. He didn’t dare do that, not now.

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Все книги серии Worldwar

In the Balance
In the Balance

War seethed across the planet. Machines soared through the air, churned through the seas, crawled across the surface, pushing ever forward, carrying death. Earth was engaged in a titanic struggle. Germany, Russia, France, China, Japan: the maps were changing day by day. The hostilities spread in ever-widening ripples of destruction: Britain, Italy, Africa… the fate of the world hung in the balance. Then the real enemy came. Out of the dark of night, out of the soft glow of dawn, out of the clear blue sky came an invasion force the likes of which Earth had never known-and worldwar was truly joined. The invaders were inhuman and they were unstoppable. Their technology was far beyond our reach, and their goal was simple. Fleetlord Atvar had arrived to claim Earth for the Empire. Never before had Earth's people been more divided. Never had the need for unity been greater. And grudgingly, inexpertly, humanity took up the challenge. In this epic novel of alternate history, Harry Turtledove takes us around the globe. We roll with German panzers; watch the coast of Britain with the RAF; and welcome alien-liberators to the Warsaw ghetto. In tiny planes we skim the vast Russian steppe, and we push the envelope of technology in secret labs at the University of Chicago. Turtledove's saga covers all the Earth, and beyond, as mankind-in all its folly and glory-faces the ultimate threat; and a turning point in history shows us a past that never was and a future that could yet come to be…

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Боевая фантастика
Tilting the Balance
Tilting the Balance

World War II screeched to a halt as the great military powers scrambled to meet an even deadlier foe. The enemy's formidable technology made their victory seem inevitable. Already Berlin and Washington, D.C., had been vaporized by atom bombs, and large parts of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Germany and its conquests lay under the invaders' thumb. Yet humanity would not give up so easily, even if the enemy's tanks, armored personnel carriers, and jet aircraft seemed unstoppable. The humans were fiendishly clever, ruthless at finding their foe's weaknesses and exploiting them. While Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Togo planned strategy, the real war continued. In Warsaw, Jews welcomed the invaders as liberators, only to be cruelly disillusioned. In China, the Communist guerrillas used every trick they knew, even getting an American baseball player to lob grenades at the enemy. Though the invaders had cut the United States practically in half at the Mississippi River and devastated much of Europe, they could not shut down America's mighty industrial power or the ferocious counterattacks of her allies. Whether delivering supplies in tiny biplanes to partisans across the vast steppes of Russia, working furiously to understand the enemy's captured radar in England, or battling house to house on the streets of Chicago, humanity would not give up. Meanwhile, an ingenious German panzer colonel had managed to steal some of the enemy's plutonium, and now the Russians, Germans, Americans, and Japanese were all laboring frantically to make their own bombs. As Turtledove's global saga of alternate history continues, humanity grows more resourceful, even as the menace worsens. No one could say when the hellish inferno of death would stop being a war of conquest and turn into a war of survival-the very survival of the planet. In this epic of civilizations in deadly combat, the end of the war could mean the end of the world as well.

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Боевая фантастика

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