Read Guardsmen of Tomorrow for Free Online Page A

cloud of dark gray volcanic ash.
    And every one of the planetary defense batteries on the Dalacradak Peninsula, from Razurig to Cape Zhadurg, was silent now, lost in the pall of the gathering storm.
    Aboard the Indeterminacy , all was darkness, chaos, and confusion. Despite the insulating effects of the drive fields, the shock of the planetary close encounter had wracked and twisted the frigate, knocking vital systems off-line, including the shipnet itself. Hazzard blinked into a smoky darkness filled with screams and yells and the intermittent flare of small electrical fires. Circuit breakers had tripped, knocking whole ship sections off the power grid; in some places, power feeds had arced, melting circuits and fuses and setting fires. Damage control robots swarmed like spidery hands, weird shadows against the flames, and Hazzard caught the acrid stink of burning insulation and fire-smothering kaon gas.
    Terror clawed at the back of his brain, but he fought down both the panic and the urge to unstrap from his jack-rack. Either full power would be restored in a moment… or the Indeterminacy , blind and helpless, would drift into the squadron melee, a crippled target. Either way, there was nothing he could do at the moment to change things, nothing to do but wait and pray that automated DC systems would bring the ship back to life.
    It was always the waiting that was the worst.
    At least he had awakened. In ship-to-ship combat, between vessels crewed by the disembodied uploads of men and women into the machines that handled the sails and fired the guns, the danger was not so much outright death, though that possibility was real enough, as it was the possibility that the data linkages between your mind within a machine and your comatose body might be abruptly broken. In one sense, your mind did not actually leave your body; the remote spider or rigging rat crawler was no more than an extension of your sensory organs, not of your brain.
    Still, too many minds were destroyed when the machinery failed, in the crippling trauma of dissociation. When the shipnet had gone off-line, most of the officers and crew had reawakened on their jackracks. Most …
    Hazzard, like most c-men, dreaded insanity more than outright death.
    At least this time, he’d come through okay. But next time-Light, life, motion, sensation flooded his brain, replacing the fire-shot blackness of the jackrack deck as the ship-net came back on-line. The damage… the damage was bad, though arguably not as bad as it could have been. Indeterminacy was in a slow tumble, falling away from Kaden’s orange-and-white disk at 29,000 kph-a slow-drifting crawl by interplanetary standards. Her dorsal fore and mainmasts, her port mizzen, her starboard mizzen, main, and foremasts were gone, snapped off by the violence of their close passage. Wreckage-the shards and tangle of splintered masts and shredded rigging-trailed alongside, threatening to fur-ther cripple the vessel as her spin fouled the remaining masts and spars.
    “Get that wreckage cut away!” he yelled into the confusion of the net. “Helm! Get this tumble under control!”
    Ahead, less than a hundred thousand kilometers distant now, four ornately decorated P’aaseni warships were moving into line-ahead for an intercept, the lead vessel the Gilaadessera , a seventy-five-gun ship of the line. Her sails spread slowly, catching the outwind of the local sun, their lead surfaces adazzle in shifting, light show display. It was a race now, between those oncoming warships and Indeterminacy‘ ’s damage control parties, ship handlers, and machines.
    Hazzard glanced astern, at the slowly receding, slowly tumbling disk of the planet.
    “Make a signal to Kaden,” he told cy-Tomlin. “Put it in all of their major dialects.
    Tell them… tell them, ‘Sorry for the miscalculation. I guess we cut that one too close!’”
    “Do you think they’ll believe our brushing them that way was an accident ?” Pardoe