"Frankowski, Leo & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

We were now five kilometers from shore, three hundred meters below the surface, nicely lined up, and at a dead stop.

The general rules also state that when you can no longer stay hidden, you should stay quick.

We were well equipped for this. Magnetically strapped to the back of each tank was a thruster unit normally used for space flight. Each unit had a gimbal-mounted hydrogen-oxygen rocket capable of accelerating the tank at forty Gs, which we humans could survive because we were each floating in a liquid bath with the same average density as our bodies.

The unit also contained a pair of Hassan-Smith receivers spatially connected through four other dimensions to some major fuel tanks somewhere on the planet. Thus, we could continue accelerating indefinitely, since we didn't have to carry our fuel along with us. This was the trick that let us get to the stars in the first place.

It was a pity that the transporters didn't conveniently lend themselves for use as a battlefield communication device.

A Mark XIX Main Battle Tank does not have a good hydrodynamic form. It's mostly an armored fusion power supply with some computers and a human being inside.

It moved itself around using a MagLev track-laying system, laying magnetic bars in front of itself, gliding over them, and picking them up as it left. When traveling over a ferro-magnetic surface, it could keep the bars inside itself, magnetize the surface and then move much faster over it. And when you put one on a real MagLev track, it could really move out, hitting three thousand kilometers an hour, in a vacuum.

Weapons and other useful things are strapped on the outside, pretty much wherever they'll fit. However, for this mission, there was a way around this unstreamlined shape.

Attached to the front of each tank was a long pole tipped with something that looked a lot like an arrowhead from an ancient crossbow bolt. When pushed hard enough through the water, and with air injected just behind the arrowhead, a cavity formed behind it that was big enough for the tank to ride inside. Once we were moving fast enough, the air was no longer needed, and we were moving in something close to a hard vacuum. This permitted us to reach supersonic speeds, under water. At least it worked fine on rocket-powered torpedoes, and we had even tested it, once, on an empty tank, which was good enough for a Kashubian veteran.

When Agnieshka told me that everybody was ready, and the moment had come when our orders said we should attack, I said, "Ladies and gentlemen! It's time to see to the Earthworms' proper education! We must teach them that it is not nice to invade somebody else's planet. I'll see you again when we're airborne! Let's move!"

But actually, it was Agnieshka who gave the firing signal. Timing on this one was very important.

Dream World vanished and I was working at combat speed, which is as fast as the human brain can operate without damage. For me, that was fifty-five times normal. Soldiers in combat often feel a natural form of this, where it seems that the world slows down around them. What we used was machine augmented, and vastly accelerated.

It is difficult, or perhaps impossible to describe fighting at combat speed in a tank. You and your tank's computers become a single entity. All of its sensors become your senses, and you can see everything from thirty cycles per second up to and including hard X-rays. Only it isn't exactly seeing. You are touching and hearing and smelling as well, all at the same time. You can taste the chemical makeup of everything around you, and feel every vibration. The tank is your body, and you know exactly what every part of it is doing. When you give your tank an order, you don't work any controls or exactly say anything. You just know what should be done, she knows what you want, and she does it.

So when I try to describe something, it's not what really happened. It's just the closest that I can come to explaining what was going on.

The thruster let loose and slammed us forward. We never hit anything like forty Gs, not with the water slowing us down, but it was still a rough ride. The hair-thin fiber-optic cable parted immediately, and the drones were left far behind. With any luck, they'd show up later. For a while, Agnieshka and I were all alone, and I could see nothing but the bubble around us.

I could feel her injecting liquid air from our coolant bottle into the vents just behind the arrowhead, mixing in enough hydrogen tapped from the thruster to warm it up to a level just below what might damage our sensors, and igniting the mixture. The vibrations got worse until we were entirely inside the bubble. Then it got smoother while the acceleration got higher. Agnieshka cut the air off, because we didn't need it any more.

We broke the surface a hundred meters from the beach, long before any of our bubbles reached the surface behind us to give us away. Hitting the air actually slowed us down a bit. The long pole and arrowhead were jettisoned, no longer needed.

The Mark XIX doesn't have a good aerodynamic shape, either, but if you put enough power behind it, you can fly a lead brick.

We were traveling at fifteen hundred kilometers per hour, but because we were mentally at combat speed, it seemed to me that we were only going at a leisurely twenty-seven kilometers per hour, with plenty of time to look around and pick out our targets.

Once out of the water, I was in communication with my team again by laser, and all of my sensors were operating once more.

A quick look around told me that my seventeen subordinates were flying parallel to me a half meter above the waves, in a line two kilometers wide. Our sonic shock waves were kicking up huge rooster tails behind us.

A glance up told me that the artillery was not letting us down. Six thousand launchers, scattered up to eight thousand kilometers away, were each firing fifteen rounds in a time-on-target barrage, mostly to keep our opponents from noticing us too soon.

I was surprised to see that quite a few of the self-targeting smart shells were getting through, and not being hit by enemy counterfire. The Earthworms were definitely not on the ball. Having a stupid enemy is one of the things that every soldier dreams about, but never believes can actually happen to him.

But to make proper use of an artillery barrage, you have to be willing to risk a few casualties. You must hit the enemy while the last of your rounds are still incoming, before he has a chance to look around and notice who is really killing him. Thus, to have a fair number of our shells not be shot out of the sky was not entirely wonderful, but there was nothing for it but to press on regardless. Maybe our shells were smart enough to tell the good guys from the bad ones.

One could always hope.