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

Abbado jumped. There'd been nearly a hundred Spooks in the hangar when the heavily-armed strikers entered. Now, seconds later, the only Kalendru still visible and moving were those who thrashed in their death throes.
Some Spooks hid beyond the corvette or behind pieces of equipment, but they weren't an immediate concern. The ones still alive aboard the vessel were a real threat.
The corvette's armory probably held enough small arms to outgun all the strikers in C41, but even that was a secondary danger. If the crew got the ship's main battery in operation, it was Katy bar the door for the whole operation.
"Fire control!" Abbado said. The code phrase keyed his words to Lieutenant Whichard of Heavy Weapons Platoon. "Give me a rocket soonest, mark!"
He focused his eyes on the ship's closed airlock and blinked twice. That highlighted the image his helmet was transmitting to Whichard and-Abbado prayed-to the sergeant of one of the rocket batteries. "Break, Three-three personnel take cover! Out."
By this time all six heavy rockets might have been launched or destroyed by Spook counterfire. If there was a round left, Abbado couldn't be sure it would bear on the target. At such short range the rockets didn't have much room to maneuver between launch and impact.
The one certain thing was that 3-3 would get the support if it was possible. There wasn't a more important target on the base. Nobody'd dreamed there was going to be a warship in the hangar. The planners might have scrubbed the whole operation if they'd known.
Abbado threw himself on the hangar floor and tugged a personal rocket from his bandolier. He twisted the base cap to extend it and arm the rocket. A 4-pound rocket was unlikely to do serious harm to a starship's hull, but unless Whichard came through they were the best 3-3 had to go on.
A striker threw an electrical grenade into the cab of the travelling hoist above her. The sharp blast flung the operator out in a shower of glass. Both electrical and fuel-air grenades had specific advantages. Electricals offered fragmentation and higher peak impulse, but fuel-air provided incendiary effect and greater total impulse.
Abbado had heard arguments on the subject go on for hours, but the truth of it was that the choice was personal whim. Combat troops like to claim that their decisions are in some objective sense "right," but they know in their hearts of hearts that they'll probably die for no better reason than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Three-three," the squad channel warned in a voice that wasn't Whichard's. "Shot!"
The eight strikers within the huge hangar crouched in the best shelter they could find. Over the general chaos, Abbado heard the crack of a rocket igniting.
The hangar's central door burst inward from the supersonic shockwave and the missile that detonated against the corvette's airlock. The hangar roof billowed up from the joists. Sheared rivets rained onto the floor.
The rocketeers had set the fuzing circuit for point focus because the warship's hull was too thick to be pierced by an omnidirectional blast. The pulse ruptured a cone of wire, forming the electrical equivalent of a chemical shaped charge. The shockwave forged a thin disk of uranium into a molten spear that struck like an asteroid.
The corvette rocked on its landing struts. The heavy-metal spike blew a hole big enough to pass a fully-equipped striker through the center of the hatch. The blast skidded Abbado three feet backward on the smooth floor, and his ears rang despite the cancellation pulse his helmet produced to save his hearing. He scrambled to his feet and ran for the opening, clasping the rocket in his left hand and the stinger in his right with the buttplate against his biceps.
It didn't occur to Guilio Abbado to order his strikers to follow him. It wouldn't have occurred to them to do anything else. If they hadn't been that sort of people, they wouldn't have been in C41.
Two strikers fired rockets through the opening before they charged. Glasebrook threw in a fuel-air grenade. That was useful for the purpose of clearing defenders from the corridors nearest the hatch, but the airlock focused the thumping explosion and knocked Abbado flat on his ass. By the time he got up, Horgen was into the ship ahead of him.
Abbado was on her heels, though he had to shove Jefferson aside. Rank hath its privileges. At a mental level pretty well buried for the moment, Abbado was afraid to die; but he was more afraid that his squad wouldn't follow him the next time if they had the least doubt that he was willing to lead from the front.
The airlock's inner valve had been half open before most of the outer door hit it and tore it off its hinges. Horgen was left-handed so she turned right down the smoky corridor. Abbado went left, sternward.
Although the Kalendru had pulled the main powerplant, the corvette's internal lighting was on. There must be an auxiliary power unit somewhere. If the lights worked, so would the guns and missile launchers.
Abbado swept the corridor with his stinger for the second and a half it took to empty the magazine, then fired the rocket in his left hand. He didn't have a target-any target, though slender bodies writhed on the decking-but he needed his hand free to reload the stinger. Launching the rocket was faster than throwing it away.
As Abbado knelt, Jefferson stepped by him and hurled a grenade into a weapons bay. A Spook jumped from behind the control console and shot the striker in the face. The grenade detonated, blowing the shredded Spook against the ceiling.
Abbado tugged an electrical grenade off his belt left handed and threw it into the compartment's opposite bay. A Spook hopped up from that console also. Abbado and Glasebrook shot him together. As the body fell back, Glasebrook tossed a fuel-air grenade on top of it.
When the bomb blew, the two strikers ran to the last compartment sternward. Neither man sent a grenade ahead to warn the Spooks they were coming. They'd worked together so often in similar situations that they coordinated without overt signals.
The Kalendru repair crew had removed the compartment's upper plating in order to lift out the powerplant. A sailor was trying to climb out of the ship through the large opening. Glasebrook shot him.
An officer's mauve-clad legs lay in the well where the Tokomak had been bolted. Abbado's randomly fired rocket had hit him in the chest.
Two Spooks waited by the bulkhead just inside the corridor hatch. One of them managed to trigger his laser as Abbado's stinger tore them point-blank. The saffron pulse ruptured a pouch of stinger reloads and gouged a collop from the sergeant's breastplate beneath.
Abbado, Glasebrook, and Foyle an instant behind hosed the lockers and netting-secured bundles that festooned the aft compartment. Stinger pellets hit too hard to ricochet, but the long bursts ripped sparks from the fittings and bulkheads. The compartment roared like a megawatt short circuit, giving the air a lambent neon radiance.
Forward, a pair of fuel-air explosions thumped. There was a sharper blast and the corvette's lighting went off. Horgen or one of the strikers with her had found the APU.
Abbado reloaded. There were no Kalendru alive aboard the ship. The seven pips on the corner of his faceshield indicated that they'd only lost Jefferson in clearing the vessel, better than he'd figured. Last year on Mulholland-two years ago?-Abbado and Jefferson had drunk their way through a case of whiskey they'd stolen from an admiral's private suite.
"Three-three come on, we're not done here," Abbado ordered. "We've still got a hangar full of-"
"C41, all personnel," Major Farrell's voice broke in over the command channel. "Evacuate the port area soonest and reform in the equipment storage lot behind the warehouses west of the concrete. We'll set up a perimeter there and wait for pickup. Soonest, people, soonest! Out!"
"What the hell?" said Flea Glasebrook. He'd been counting stinger magazines remaining. His index finger still pointed to the pouch he'd reached when the call came.
Abbado tried to suck a drink of water. He coughed and spewed it across the inside of his faceshield. "Three-three to the truck," he ordered when he got his voice back. "Watch that there's not somebody waiting when we come through the hatch."
He hoped the truck still worked. He really hoped the truck still worked. He was afraid to think any farther ahead than that.
- 3 -
Blohm lay in the crawlspace beneath a warehouse, ten feet back from the wall. He could see wedges of the port through half a dozen of the open ventilators, but he was practically invisible from the outside.
A pair of Kalendru crouched at the base of a freighter in the middle of the field. They held shoulder-stocked lasers. Blohm aimed his stinger and squeezed twice: separate short bursts rather than a single long one. The projectiles' vaporized driving bands fluoresced in the dimness.
Pellets that missed sparkled like fairy dust against the starship's hull. The Spooks toppled. Blohm scrambled a few feet sideways. Somebody might have noticed the vague flicker from his stinger's muzzle.
You've got to be fast. You've got to act without thinking. Otherwise you're as dead as a child in a fuel-air blast.
On a corner of Blohm's visor was a remote image from Sergeant Gabrilovitch. Gabe had retreated with most of C41 behind the line of warehouses. The lot there was half the size of the huge landing field. It held thousands of vehicles and pieces of heavy equipment in open storage ready for transshipment, but even that quantity of matщriel didn't fill the space. The pickup ship could land without scratching its paint on the Spook hardware.
If a ship arrived. If anybody in C41 was alive when it arrived. But worrying about that was somebody else's job.
A vehicle drove through one of the smashed doors of the huge maintenance hangar across the port. Blohm aimed, dialing up the magnification of the stinger's holographic sight while keeping his visor at 1:1 for breadth of field.
No target. It was a Spook truck, all right, but there were three strikers in the battered cab and others clinging to the back. Abbado was bringing his people back, most of them at least. A pair of missiles hit close enough to stagger the vehicle, but it continued to accelerate. Two of the left-side tires were flat, giving the truck a shimmy.
Blohm wished he was alone on a planet. No decisions to make, no responsibilities. Nobody to worry about but himself.
Something rustled; the local equivalent of a rat, or perhaps just leaves blowing. Blohm didn't look away from the ventilators, his firing slits. His helmet would warn him of any infrared source corresponding to a human or a Kalender. Even a Kalender child.
Three Kalendru ran out of the distant hangar. Two had lasers; the Spook in the middle lifted a long launching tube to his shoulder.
Blohm shot the rocketeer first. The Spook dropped his tube and staggered backward, but he stayed on his feet.
This was long range for a stinger. The pellets depended on kinetic energy for their effect, and air resistance scrubbed off velocity. Kalendru lasers had better performance than stingers at ranges of three hundred yards and beyond, but it wasn't often you had to worry about shooting the breadth of a starport.
Blohm raised his point of aim slightly for the second target. The burst hit the Spook in the face and throat. He flung up his hands and fell backward.