"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 13 - The Sharp End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

The partygoers gaped without understanding at the multidirectional byplay. Most of them were drunk or
nearly drunk. Captain Wilcken was white-faced but sober. The glance he exchanged with Colonel Jaffe,
equally well-born and head of the garrison's supply department, held more terror than confusion.

Coke keyed his helmet. "Sixto Four elements" he said."Take thтАФ"

He didn't get the last word,'them,' out of his mouth before the split display behind him ignited with
gunfire and explosions,

"I'm sounding the general alarm," Coke said calmly as he turned his back on the Marquis. He uncaged
and pressed one of the special-use switches at the side of his consoles keyboard. The artificial
intelligence sent an alert signal to every node on Fortress Auerstadts communications network. The siren
on the roof of the TOC began to wind.

The holographic display shimmered with the cyan hell engulfing Parcotch.

A Frisian combat car mounted three tribarrels in its open fighting compartment. Each weapon fired 2-cm
powergun ammunition at a cyclic rate of about 500 rounds per minute. Because the barrels rotated
through the firing position and had time to cool between shots, a tribarrel could fire sustainedly for several
minutes before burning out. In that time, the powerful bolts of ionized copper atoms could peck halfway
through the side of a mountain.

NothingMother Love andThe Facts of Life faced at Parcotch had armor protection. The targets,
unprepared Association soldiers and the civilian helpers driving the vehicles, wilted like wax in a
blowtorch.

The Facts of Life'stwo wing guns hit the trailer of anti-tank rockets and the tractor towing it. That was
overkill тАФ a single tribarrel should have been sufficient тАФ but the rocket pod was the only real danger to
the Frisian vehicles, and Lennox hadn't survived to become a veteran by taking needless risks.

Cyan bolts licked the pod. The solid rocket fuel burned in a huge yellow ball, technically not an
explosion but wholly destructive of everything within its 10-meter diameter.

At least one of the missile warheadsdid detonate. The white flash of 40 kilos of HE punctuated the
saffron fireball. The tractor-trailer combination blew apart. Blazing debris rained across the landscape,
igniting the houses of Hamlet 2 and the heads of the ripe grain in the paddies.

On the other side of the display,Mother Love's three tribarrels clawed the infantry packed into the
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civilian vehicles. Ammunition and grenades went off in secondary explosions, but the stabbing cyan
plasma itself did most of the damage. The Association troops were too crowded to fight or flee in the first
instants of the ambush, and those instants were all that remained to scores of them.

A stray bolt ruptured the fuel tank under a truck cab. Kerosine, superheated and atomized by the
plasma, expanded into an explosive mixture with the surrounding atmosphere тАФ