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

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 sun's corona bathed the cannoneers as soon as they began to fire their belt-fed weapons. The armor's 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 strikers' rockets. The port's 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 weren't 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 unit's 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 Platoon's triple launchers. That was fast work, but the team had set up beside the ship because there wasn't 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.
"Feed me!" the sergeant screamed as Santini dragged a 16-round belt from one of his cannisters. "Feed me!"
As she opened a cannister one-handed, Meyer looked over the rim of the pit. She dialed up her visor's magnification. The gun was placed to cover the main highway entering the starport from the north. Seven miles up that road was the planet's 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 fireball, but they hadn't destroyed it. Air shimmered in a corona discharge as the tank's 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 warhead's 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 Spook's hesitation, and if you hesitated you were handing him your head as well as maybe the heads of the strikers behind you. Technically the building's ground floor wasn't Blohm's responsibility, but this wasn't a time to stand on ceremony.
Blohm trusted himself not to hesitate. Never. Not so much as a heartbeat.
First Platoon's objective was to clear the garrison's 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 wouldn't 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 C41's scouts. They'd been assigned to lead the four survivors of the platoon's 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 Weapons' 50-pound rockets. An instant later the transient compound to Blohm's 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 didn't send him tumbling as it would have done had it hit him while he was airborne on the jump belt.
Blohm looked up the barracks' 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 he'd 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.
The blast blew the remainder of the pane-clear thermoplastic rather than glass-out past Blohm in a gulp of red flame. He pulled himself through the opening and unlatched the jump belt with his left hand as soon as he was into the smoldering corridor beyond. The belt still had another thirty seconds or so of fuel, but the weight was more of a hindrance than any possible gain it could offer the striker now. The ground wasn't so far away that Blohm couldn't jump down without serious concern.
The bodies in the hallway looked like charred logs. The explosion had destroyed the light fixtures and filled the air with swirling hot smoke. The faceshield of the striker's helmet offered light enhancement and thermal imaging as viewing options, but neither would have helped a great deal under these conditions.
Blohm didn't bother. He had four rounds left in the magazine of his short-barreled grenade launcher. He ran down the hall, firing one round into each room as he passed. Because the fuze required impact to arm it, Blohm shot through the wall if the door was already open. He had to hope that the internal partitions would be thin enough for the grenade to penetrate.
Blohm compensated reflexively when explosions rocked him from side to side. He wasn't thinking or seeing as a human does. He'd programmed himself like a machine to accomplish a particular task as fast as possible.
"Coming through!" Gabrilovitch shouted. The hall darkened as the sergeant's armored body filled the window sash.
Blohm crouched against the wall as he reloaded. The launcher wasn't a weapon he particularly liked, but he'd spent the voyage out practicing with it until he could perform all the necessary operations instinctively. It was hard to breathe. His helmet filtered toxins, but the fuel-air grenades had used up a lot of the available oxygen.
There were three rooms left on the corridor. The Spook troops in them could have used the pause to ready their own weapons, but there was no time to worry. Just to act.
Blohm straightened. Gabrilovitch's stinger rasped behind him as the sergeant shot a body that was still twitching after the grenade went off.
Blohm lunged forward, firing three times in a single flowing motion. Between the first shot and the second he heard Gabrilovitch scream, "Cease fire! Cease-"
But the words didn't penetrate until Caius Blohm had completed his mission.
"-fire! They're not soldiers, they're kids!"
-2-
Meyer's helmet highlighted movement on the panorama display at the lower edge of her visor. Three Spooks were running toward the rear of the gun position.
She turned, bouncing her armored hip against the transformer as she raised her stinger. Her burst went wildly high. The Spooks dropped into a sunken track twenty feet from the transformer pit. It held one of the cogged tramlines that spiderwebbed the port to haul ships after landing.
Meyer should have been watching the south. The cataclysmic destruction of the tank had drawn her attention three miles down the road in the wrong direction. She didn't know where the Spooks had come-
Two more Spooks ran from the underside of a starship a hundred yards away. They weren't wearing uniforms, but one had a laser, and the bag the other carried probably wasn't full of apples. Their long legs covered ground as fast as a shadow spreads when the sun goes behind a cloud.
Meyer shot the leader with the satchel. The second Spook fired as he ran, but his laser threw up chunks of concrete nearer his own feet than his target. Meyer sighted and sawed the slim body nearly in half. The Spook's corpse hit face down, but his toes pointed in the air.
A 50-pound rocket lit, blasted from its launcher, and banked in a screaming turn that took it southward out of the port area. Meyer could see the target only as a series of dots low in the distant sky. A dot and the missile's tracking flare merged. A flash that grew into a fireball filled several degrees of horizon.
The target was probably a personnel carrier, armored against small-arms fire but still light enough-unlike the hundred-ton tanks-to fly. All the dots vanished. Only one had been destroyed, but the others would have to slow down and hug the ground during the remainder of their approach to the battle.
The visor would magnify by up to a thousand times, but Meyer needed as broad a range of vision as possible to do her own job. She'd almost gotten herself and the rest of the crew killed by looking in the wrong direction.
A Spook threw a grenade out of the tramline. It landed short and went off in a yellow flash. The shock buffeted Meyer; a few fragments cracked against her armor. She fired at the top of the trench, blasting powdered concrete from both sides without harming the Spooks below. One of them popped up ten feet from where Meyer was aiming and fired his laser. If he hadn't been more concerned to duck back to safety than to aim, he'd have burned her head off.
Meyer swung her stinger and shot holes in the air. Two more grenades sailed from separate points along the tramline. The grenadiers weren't showing more than a hand and wrist for a fraction of a second. One grenade landed wide, but the other bounced toward the lip of the transformer pit.
"Down!" Meyer screamed to the gun crew as she hunched low. Fragments of casing and concrete flew in all directions.
The plasma cannon stopped in mid-burst when the grenade exploded. Bloch bellowed a curse. One of the cannon's bipod legs had been blown off. Santini stuck his left forearm under the gunbarrel to support it.
A second tank, starkly terrible in the glow of ions from bolts which its shielding had shrugged off, glided around the wreckage of its sister vehicle.
Meyer jumped out of the transformer pit and ran toward the tramline. Sooner or later the Spooks were going to throw a grenade into the pit. If the blast didn't kill the strikers outright, it would stun them for the fellow with the laser to finish off.
She was ten feet from the tramline when a grenadier raised himself to throw. He saw Meyer's armored figure stumping toward him and dived back with a gobble of horror. The Spook with the laser rose an instant later. Meyer was standing almost on top of him. Her stinger blew him inside out.
Without lifting her finger from the trigger, Meyer hosed the two grenadiers cowering against the cogged track. Sparks, concrete dust, and bits of flesh sprayed from where the pellets hit.
Meyer turned toward the transformer pit. The cannon was firing again. Only a series of plasma bolts in rapid succession could hammer through a tank's magnetic shielding. The tank halted as its fusion powerplant shunted all available power from the lift fans to the shield. It wasn't enough. A moment later Bloch's sixth pulse of thermonuclear energy hit the tank itself.
The shockwave spalled the inner face of the armor across the fighting compartment. The Kalendru crew were all dead before the next round ruptured the powerplant's containment bottle in a greater secondary explosion.
Meyer hadn't noticed her hard suit's weight and chafing when she charged the Spook position. Now she felt drained and dizzy. She sucked at the teat supplying water from the integral canteen as she took a second step toward the pit.