"David Drake - Redliners (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

last out of the ship. With their full armor and bulky loads theyтАЩd have
needlessly slowed less heavily equipped strikers.
There was no return fire as yet but itтАЩd come soon enough. When it
did, the maneuver platoons would be damned glad of 50-pound missile
launchers and the plasma cannon.
Sergeant Bloch was a big man who looked gigantic in his polished
white armor. His dolly supported the cannon itself and a three-round
belt of ready cartridges. Twenty yards to the northeast was a pit
holding a transformer beneath surface level where it didnтАЩt interfere
with starships being hauled across the port in giant cradles. Bloch
hunched toward it at a dead run. The pit was the best cover in his
sector.
All Fourth Platoon personnel wore hard suits. The crews handling
the triple launchers had to worry about the backblast of their own
heavy missiles, and a mist of ions as hot as a sunтАЩs corona bathed the
cannoneers as soon as they began to fire their belt-fed weapons. The
armorтАЩs protection from enemy counterfire was a secondary concern.
Meyer heard the high-pitched scream of Spook lasers in addition to
the snarl of stingers and the crackWHAM! of the strikersтАЩ rockets. The
portтАЩs surface flared white at the corner of her eye as a beam burned
concrete to glass and quicklime. The Spooks were awake, though for
the moment they seemed to be spraying the landscape in panic.
Bloch stepped into the waist-high transformer pit and wrestled the
gun onto its bipod in firing position. Santini simply pushed the ammo
dolly in ahead of himself. The cannisters were padded against shock,
but a direct hit from a laser might penetrate. The best result the crew
could hope for then was a low-order explosion that might not kill
them. If the bead of deuterium at the heart of each cartridge detonated,
hard suits werenтАЩt going to make any difference to the resulting
thermonuclear explosion.
The captured freighter erupted smoke and another sheaf of anti-
emitter missiles. Those were launched automatically when the unitтАЩs
artificial intelligence sensed Kalendru-type radio frequency emissions.
The streak of light that ended in a lightning-sharp explosion in the
transient barracks was a missile from one of 4th PlatoonтАЩs triple
launchers. That was fast work, but the team had set up beside the ship
because there wasnтАЩt any cover in their direction anyway.
Meyer jumped her dolly into the transformer pit and followed it.
Bloch fired his ready ammunition in three ravening pulses as fast as
the gun would cycle. The ringing air glowed like the heart of a
rainbow.
тАЬFeed me!тАЭ the sergeant screamed as Santini dragged a 16-round
belt from one of his cannisters. тАЬFeed me!тАЭ
As she opened a cannister one-handed, Meyer looked over the rim
of the pit. She dialed up her visorтАЩs magnification. The gun was placed
to cover the main highway entering the starport from the north. Seven
miles up that road was the planetтАЩs largest military base, code-named
Active Grid for this operation. That was probably where the tank at
which Bloch was hammering had come from.
The plasma bolts had grounded the huge vehicle in an iridescent