"Frankowski,.Leo.-.Tank.2.-.War.With.Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

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.

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.