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

fireball, but they hadnтАЩt destroyed it. Air shimmered in a corona
discharge as the tankтАЩs generators rebuilt its magnetic shielding.
The Spooks were awake, all right.

The front door of the guard barracks started to open while Striker
Caius Blohm was still twenty yards from the building. He fired one of
his penetrator grenades through the panel. An instant later the
warheadтАЩs atomized fuel mixed with the air and detonated, blowing
splinters of the door in one direction and the charred fragments of the
Spook in the other.
Blohm liked to be on point. In this war the choice was to be quick or
dead, and the Spooks were plenty damn quick. Your best chance of
survival was the SpookтАЩs hesitation, and if you hesitated you were
handing him your head as well as maybe the heads of the strikers
behind you. Technically the buildingтАЩs ground floor wasnтАЩt BlohmтАЩs
responsibility, but this wasnтАЩt a time to stand on ceremony.
Blohm trusted himself not to hesitate. Never. Not so much as a
heartbeat.
First PlatoonтАЩs objective was to clear the garrisonтАЩs three-story
barracks. The planners had nixed putting a heavy rocket into the
structure because the port command center might be either in the
barracks or in the administration building.
The command center would be hardened. Burying it in the rubble of
the upper floors wouldnтАЩt keep the Spooks in the center from using
their outlying gun and missile positions to blow the hell out of first
C41, then any Unity vessel that appeared on this hemisphere of the
planet.
Blohm and Sergeant Gabrilovitch were C41тАЩs scouts. TheyтАЩd been
assigned to lead the four survivors of the platoonтАЩs understrength First
Squad through the top floor of the barracks while the remainder of the
platoon took care of the lower stories. If there was a control room in
the basement, Lieutenant Kuznetsov wanted to be able to open it
without worrying about Spooks coming down the stairs behind her.
At the base of the wall Blohm armed his jump belt. He paused and
bent over when he heard the roaring ignition of one of Heavy
WeaponsтАЩ 50-pound rockets. An instant later the transient compound
to BlohmтАЩs left disintegrated in a green flash and a thunderclap.
The rocket warheads pulsed electricity through an osmium wire
whose resistance blew it apart with enormous force. Batteries stored
energy more efficiently than chemical high explosives. The bursting
wire propagated shockwaves at several times the rate of HE, giving the
warheads great shattering force. The blast slapped Blohm hard, but it
didnтАЩt send him tumbling as it would have done had it hit him while he
was airborne on the jump belt.
Blohm looked up the barracksтАЩ facade, then triggered his belt. The
four self-stabilizing nozzles lifted him vertically at a controllable ten
feet per second. He hovered beside the window heтАЩd chosen for entry
and fired a penetrator through the pane. The projectiles were fuzed to
burst a tenth of a second after impact and spray their filling into the
space beyond.