"David Drake - Belisarius 2 - In The Heart Of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

cunning, mongoose mind of his foreign master.

Chapter 3
The sun beat down on a nightmare landscape. Once, these had been fields and
orchards. Now, the ground was criss-crossed with deep trenches; stripped bare
of any life beyond a few splintered trees, handfuls of crushed wheat, a single
stalk of corn.
"Where are we?" asked Belisarius. He spoke in a low mutter. His eyes were
closed, the better to concentrate on the images flashing through his mind.
"And when?"
Near a place called Kursk, replied Aide. The facets flashed for a microsecond,
translating the crystalline precision of Time's Arrow into the bizarre fiats
of human calendrical custom. A millenia and a half from now.
A line of monsters surged onto the field. Gigantic things, tearing the soil
with strange continuous belts -- metal slats running over wheels. Forward,
from cupolas, immense snouts protruded. The snouts belched flame and smoke.
Emblazoned on their flanks were crosses -- some, square with double lines;
others, bent.
"Iron elephants," whispered Belisarius. "Like the ones the Malwa will build --
but so much better!"
Tanks. They will be called tanks. These are the type which will be called PzKw
V "Panthers." They will weigh 45 tons and travel up to 34 miles per hour. They
fire a cannon whose size will be called 75 millimeter.
From the opposite side of the field, a new line of monsters -- tanks --
charged forward. They began exchanging cannon fire with the other tanks.
Belisarius could sense that these new tanks were of a slightly different
design, but the only feature which registered clearly on his uneducated eye
was that, instead of crosses, their flanks were marked by red stars.
This was the best tank of that era. It will be called the T-34.
The battle was horrible and dazzling at the same time.
Horrible, in its destruction. Belisarius saw a tank cupola --
Turret.
-- turret blown off. Tons of metal sent sailing, like a man decapitated. The
body of the tank belched flame, and he knew the men inside were being
incinerated. Saw men clambering from another burning tank, shrieking, their
uniforms afire. Saw them die, suddenly, swept down by an invisible scythe.
Machine-gun fire.
Dazzling, in the speed of the tanks, and the accuracy of their fire. Like a
vision of St. George battling the dragon, except the saint was a dragon
himself. And his lance a magic wand belching flame and fury.
"How?"
Images of complex -- machines?
Internal combustion engines.
Images of perfect metal tubes -- cannon barrels, Belisarius realized. He
watched as an object was fit into one of the tubes. A perfect fit. He wondered
what it was until he saw the cannon fire. Cannonball, he realized -- except it
was not a ball. It was a cylinder capped by its own cupola.
"How can metal be shaped so precisely?"
He was inside a huge building. A manufactory, he realized. Everywhere he could
see rolls and slabs of steel being shaped and cut with incredible speed and