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

suggestions and their proofreading of this manuscript, and my remarkable
partner, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, for always being at my side,
even though we live half a world from each other.
 Baen Books by Leo Frankowski
A Boy and His Tank
The War With Earth (with Dave Grossman)
The Fata Morgana
Conrad's Time Machine
 PROLOGUE

An Amphibious Attack
on Baden-Baden Island
Rail guns and X-ray lasers being what they are, military doctrine is that if you can see
it, you can kill it. If they can see you, you are dead.
The art of war has become the art of not being seen.
Thus it was that I was in my tank, crawling along the bottom of the ocean, leading
three squads of the Kashubian Expeditionary Forces against the invaders from Earth.
They had picked the most isolated spot on the planet for their beachhead, a group of six
uninhabited islands under the jurisdiction of the smallest nation on New Yugoslavia, the
German Enclave.
New Yugoslavia's turbulent seas protected us from both enemy sonar and almost
everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. Oh, a deep-scan radar might have found us,
if it was looking down from low orbit, but rail guns from both sides had taken out
everything in orbit long ago.
Anyone using a high-flying aircraft in wartime is simply suicidal.
We had been down here for seven of the planet's short, twenty-hour days, and we had
been having a fine enough time of it. The fiber-optic communication cables we trailed
behind us were finer than a human hair, and needed constant patching in these seas. We
had lost contact with our main forces three hours after we left, as expected, but we were
in touch with each other. Keeping us connected was the job of three semisentient aquatic
drones, and not my worry. Connected, we had the bandwidth we needed to live together
in Dream World, a sort of virtual reality.
Since all of our tanks had the diamond semiconductor upgrade, they could keep us in
Dream World at thirty times normal speed. To us, the week had seemed like almost six
standard months. Having one's lifespan effectively expanded by a factor of thirty was one
of the fringe benefits of the job.
A dozen of my people had been raw recruits when we started, and this gave them the
time they needed to get through basic training, and then to see a good deal of simulated
combat.
Of course, they weren't told that it was simulated. Dream World was convincing
enough to make them think that they were really fighting, and that their friends were
dying around them. It was rough on them psychologically, but it let us turn out seasoned
troops without having to kill any of them.
After all, they did it to me, and I turned out okay.
I spent most of my time at the University of Oxbridge, working on my B.S. in
Agriculture. I already had a Bachelors degree in engineering and a Ph.D. in Military
Science, but I also had a major tract of land on New Yugoslavia, and when this war was
over, I wanted to be able to manage it properly.
My wife, Kasia, was in her own tank, a hundred meters to my left. She was studying
economics, and fuming about not being able to keep in touch with what her stocks were