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

I heard Lloyd yell "Tally Ho!" and open up with his rail gun before I spotted any of the enemy myself. Then I saw that they were dug into some low dunes just past the beach. The beach defenses were not shooting at our artillery shells, having apparently been ordered to keep on the lookout for somebody exactly like yours truly. But the temptation to keep your weapon pointed up, so that you could take out a shell that might be coming straight at you was just too strong for those boys. Their muzzles were all straight up, and not trained at us at all.

That was their fatal mistake.

My rail gun put a swarm of osmium needles, traveling at a quarter of light speed with only three meters between them, across two hundred meters of the dunes, a split second before Kasia on my left and Zuzanna on my right did the same. I saw a dozen Earth tanks peel open like so many flowers blooming on a television nature program. They never got a burst off at us, being too busy looking up at the incoming artillery, I suppose.

We went up and over the dunes, cutting a two-kilometer-wide swath through the length of an island that was only four kilometers wide. General Sobieski hadn't been much interested in capturing prisoners. He just wanted them gone from our planet. This made things a lot easier.

Off to my right, one of the new recruits under Mirko went down in a spray of sand and vegetation. He'd been a safecracker from Nova Split that everybody called Frenchy, and I'd rather liked the kid, but there was no stopping for him, not now. As best as I could tell, he'd been hit by one of our own artillery shells. It didn't explode, so its little brain had probably been fried out by an enemy X-ray laser.

Just damned rotten luck.

A rolling artillery barrage preceded us as we cut through the island, but now, since the dangerous period of breaking through their shore defenses was over, the exploding shells stayed ahead of us by more than three hundred meters.

Five kilometers in, we came across a fair-sized base. Intelligence hadn't mentioned anything like this! There looked to be thousands of troops running madly about. Infantry? Why in hell would anybody bring infantry into a war zone?

Hundreds of tank turrets and artillery pieces were spinning toward us, and not a few shoulder-held rockets were being brought up. There wasn't anything that we could do but open up on them. We either had to take out their heavy weapons or get killed ourselves.

"Rip 'em up!" I yelled.

An unprotected human body within two hundred meters of a rail gun blast is dead. That was the main reason why our tanks were so heavily armored, to protect us from our own weapons. There wasn't any armor that could protect us from a direct hit by an enemy rail gun.

The Earthworms never had a chance. We were flying two meters above the ground at supersonic speed, in tanks with the aerodynamic qualities of a brick. The shock waves we were generating in the air alone would have killed most of those guys, and when you add the rail guns into the equation, it was a total massacre, bloody and simple.

They did get off a few rounds. I saw a tank on my left flank explode in the air as its fusion bottle blew, and bits of his armor tore into the earth.

That was a rare thing. Usually, dozens of fail-safes stopped your power supply from turning into a medium-sized thermonuclear bomb, but anything that can go wrong, sometimes does.

There was no hope for our trooper, whoever he was. Nor for anyone unprotected within two kilometers of the explosion. As it was, the blast knocked me a hundred meters off course, and damn nearly knocked my wife into the dirt, but we didn't lose anybody else. We closed up the gaps, and we were all soon back on course.

The rest of the fifteen-kilometer island went fairly smoothly, although my troops were taking out anything that looked as if it ever once might have wanted to be alive. Losing a few of your own does that to people.

In real time, we went the length of the island in thirty-six seconds. At combat speed, it felt like it was over half an hour, plenty of time to not miss anything.

Then, having taken out both ends and the center of the enemy-held island, I split what remained of my team in half. We made a U-turn over the ocean and came back at them. We worked over both edges of the island that we had skipped on the way in, taking them on the flank.

The time-on-target rolling artillery barrage was still just ahead of us. Those guys, or rather their computers, were really on the ball. We were picking our rail gun targets, and then shooting them up through the exploding artillery. It was pretty effective.

There wasn't much resistance. Most of the enemy had abandoned their positions and run for it. Just where they were planning to run to was beyond me, but as a military force, they were done.

Our second wave was already arriving, crawling out of the ocean. The two hundred tanks were equipped with antipersonnel drones, semi-intelligent, expendable robots that could round up the survivors and clean up any small pockets of resistance.

My three squads headed for the beach, not wanting to look at the carnage we had created inland.

We landed around the tank that had taken one of our own artillery shells, and formed a defensive circle. Mirko got out of his tank and walked naked over to the bent and wrecked machine that held the body of one of his men. It was the kind of thing that he had to do by himself.

Then, to the wonderment of us all, the coffin slowly emerged from the back of the wreck! Frenchy, shaken but still alive, sat up, took off his helmet, and pulled out the computer that held his tank's personality.

The rest of us gave him an enthusiastic cheer, over the comm lasers and out our external speakers, too! Most of us waved to him with our manipulator arms.