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

A black spot flecked the sky at the corner of her eye. Meyer threw herself to the ground. She was still falling when the missile launched from Active Grid plunged into the transformer pit.
The concrete rippled, slamming Meyer on the chest. She flipped onto her back like a pancake. The walls of the pit channeled the blast and fragments skyward, but the gun, the crew, and the transformer itself vanished utterly in a white flash.
Where the hell was the rest of the Unity invasion force?

The steps to the admin building's second floor were individually taller and more shallow than those of human structures. The Spook running down them hooting had no trouble until Leinsdorf ripped his white tunic to bloody shreds an instant before Farrell got his stinger on target.
A striker with smoke still curling from the nozzles of her jump belt appeared at the top of the stairs. She shot the Spook again as he toppled forward.
The floor plan of the port administration building was almost circular: almost, because of Kalendru distaste for right angles and constant-radius curves. The ground floor was a bullpen with office cubbies around the outer walls and an open concourse in the center.
Farrell didn't suppose there could be a design that would have provided a better kill zone for the volley of grenades and 4-pound rockets his strikers sent through the clear facade of the building as they charged. There'd been twenty-odd Spooks present, but only one or two had survived long enough to be killed by stinger pellets. The upper story must be broken into smaller spaces.
Strikers now crouched at the side windows and the door to the parking lot behind the building. Farrell's visor overlaid images from the helmets of a guard from each quadrant. The ghost viewpoints were each an eighth-field 30 percent mask across the top. They interfered to a degree with Farrell's normal vision, but he was used to operating that way. He had to keep track of everything that was happening or else he'd get his people killed.
The breaching charge went off in the armored stairwell opposite the main doors. The electrically-generated pulse sounded like starships colliding: sharp, metallic, and immensely loud.
The well channeled the backblast upward to tear a ten-foot hole in the bullpen ceiling. Farrell hoped none of the squad clearing the second floor had been standing in the wrong place. A striker with a grenade launcher chugged his entire magazine through the opened door at the bottom of the stairs.
The stairwell belched red flame. Two strikers went in with their stingers pointed. Spooks couldn't carry the weight of armor sturdy enough to survive the grenade blasts, but it was possible that the first door opened onto an anteroom and the real control room was still sealed.
Farrell instinctively started to follow his troops; Leinsdorf blocked him without hesitation. Art Farrell was a big man. Leinsdorf was bigger and even stronger.
Leinsdorf's job was to keep the major alive. When that meant stopping Farrell from doing something stupid, Leinsdorf did whatever had to be done.
Nadia Broz carried a jamming rig instead of extra weapons. While shooting was still going on she'd attached the jammer to an antenna lead from one of the building's wrecked consoles. An anti-emitter missile had cut the roof mast while C41 unassed, but the stump was sufficient for Nadia's purposes.
She glanced up from her display and caught Farrell's eyes on her. "The port defenses shut down when we blew the vault," she said, shouting over the racket instead of using helmet commo to speak to Farrell ten feet away. "The missile batteries at Active Grid are live, though, and the base has links to the sensors here. There's nothing I can do about that."
"We've got support coming," Farrell said, wondering how many of his people were going to die before that support arrived. "They may be hitting Active Grid already."
There were in the order of 50,000 Kalendru troops quartered at Active Grid. The sprawling base was targeted for massive strikes: initially from orbit, followed by dedicated ground-attack vessels making low-level passes. The crucial low-level phase couldn't begin until the Kalendru hemispheric defenses had been knocked out.
It would take the Spooks hours, maybe days, to bypass the control net centered on the vault Farrell's strikers had just opened and destroyed. The missile artillery at Active Grid could pulverize C41, though.
The jammer provided a partial defense. Terminal guidance made artillery accurate to within ten feet. If the missile depended on data loaded into it before launch, accuracy dropped to a Circular Error Probability of sixty-five feet.
The captured freighter erupted when half a dozen Spook rounds hit it in rapid succession. The starport and military base had been designed and built as a mutually-supporting pair. Buried cables linked sensors in the port area to consoles at Active Grid, allowing the Kalendru gunners to refine their targeting with sensor data. While the result wasn't as good as terminal guidance, it was good enough for targets the size of a starship.
Pretty quick it would dawn on the Spooks they could now shell the port administration building off the map without harming any of their own people.
"The building's secured, sir," reported Sergeant Bastien, the acting commander of Third Platoon. "Shall I shift a squad across to help Abbado?"
A 50-pound rocket slammed from its launcher, supersonic within the first twenty feet of flight. The missile screamed downrange.
C41's plasma cannon were firing also. One of Farrell's overlaid remote images showed a huge explosion in the distance along the highway. The shockwave reached him in two pulses, through the ground and an instant later on the air. Leinsdorf, restive as he looked across the concourse and out the back door, unslung his single-shot plasma weapon. Another Spook tank was maneuvering past the mushrooming tombstone of the first.
"No, withdraw both squads to the warehouses," Farrell ordered. "Abbado has to take his chances. Nobody's going to make it across that bare concrete till the fleet takes care of Active Grid."
He turned. "Nadia," he said, "leave the jammer set up, but we got to get out of here. The-"
Farrell's visor flashed red, indicating a signal from orbital command. One of his supplementary commo units was a dedicated link to the flagship.
"Primrose Charlie Four-One, this is Primrose," an emotionless voice said. "The operation has been aborted. A large Kalendru fleet is approaching the planet. Can you extract your unit yourself? Over."
"Primrose, hell no!" Farrell said. At the corner of his eye he saw another missile hit the remains of the freighter. "Primrose, for Chrissake, get us a strike on Active Grid. They've got the port observed. They're chewing us up and you won't be able to get a boat in. Over!"
"Charlie Four-One, Negative," the voice said. Farrell wondered if it was an AI program speaking. No, a computerized voice would have more feeling. This was a human officer who wasn't going to let emotional loading get in the way of precise communication. "If possible, withdraw your unit to a site out of Kalendru observation and await pickup. Primrose out."
Out was the operative word. C41 was shit out of luck.

One of the strikers who entered the barracks behind Caius Blohm had clamped a line to the sash for them to leave by. It was about the only useful thing anybody in 1-1 had accomplished during the operation.
Blohm rappelled down the side of the building. First in, last out. The grenade launcher slapped against his breastplate each time he braked with his gloved palms. The weapon was heavy. He'd locked in a fresh magazine to replace the one from which he'd fired three rounds.
His boots hit the ground. The ship that brought C41 was a shattered wreck, the upper half molten. Another missile hit the derelict, lifting a mighty fireball. The Spooks used chemical explosives. The general level of noise was so high that the blast didn't sound particularly loud.
Blohm glanced up the way he'd come. Flames wavered sluggishly from several of the third-floor windows. The fuel-air bombs had ignited fabrics, paper, splintered furniture. Spooks didn't have hair to burn, not really, but the explosions had charred the victims' flesh deeply.
There'd been a lot of them on the top floor of the barracks. Over a hundred, Blohm figured, judging from the one room he'd taken a good look into after Gabrilovitch shouted at him.
Kalendru females were shorter and even slimmer than the males, and they were never members of the fighting forces. Some of the burned corpses were females but most were children. Maybe dependents, maybe overflow from civilian facilities on the south side of the field. Certainly not combatants. But certainly dead.
And very certainly killed by Caius Blohm. He'd completed the job before anybody else arrived. Nothing wrong with his reflexes, no sir.
He ran past the shattered transient compound, following Gabrilovitch. A Spook missile hit twenty yards away and blew a hole in bare concrete. Again a red fireball pulsed upward through sooty black smoke. The air zinged, but none of the fragments hit Blohm.
If a missile went off at his feet, it might burn his shattered body as black as that of the Spook child on the threshold of the room Blohm had looked into.

The good news was that the hangar door ruptured when the truck hit it. Stiffeners sang like guitar strings, parting the welds that anchored them to the edges of the track.
Horgen skidded all eight wheels as she braked. There was nothing to hit in the left bay except bodies and whatever gear the Spook repair staff had dropped when the strikers drove into them shooting.
Abbado's visor reacted automatically to the lower light levels within the structure. He pointed his stinger toward a group of Spooks trying to get behind a large toolcart and held the trigger down. The fishtailing truck ripped the stream of pellets across the Spooks and they all dropped.
The bad news was that a Kalendru corvette filled the hangar's central bay.
This was a land-force logistics base, not a fleet repair facility. There weren't supposed to be naval vessels present, not even relatively small ones with their Tokomak powerplant lifted half out of the cylindrical hull on a gantry. Spooks swarmed up the ramped hatchway. Mostly they were maintenance staffers clothed in motley blues and grays, but a few were mauve-uniformed naval personnel.
An officer with a tuft of black feathers on either epaulet fired a laser pistol at Abbado. The Spook blew two divots from the truck's door before Abbado killed him. Glasebrook leaned through the shattered windshield and fired a rocket into the corvette's airlock, shredding the officer's body and a half dozen other Kalendru. Horgen had dived from the truck, so the backblast didn't fry her.
The hatch rotated closed. The edge mated solidly with the coaming despite the fact that a Spook's arm lay across it.