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

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