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

doing on the market. She'd made a fortune at it during our last leave.
One of my subordinate squad leaders, Mirko, spent his spare time in Dream World,
working his small farm with two draft horses, the same thing he had just done in the flesh
during his last leave. An odd fellow, but a good man to have on your side when things got
complicated. He had a knack for asking the right simple question which then made
everything else fall into place.
The other squad leader, Lloyd Tomlinson, was also attending the university, working
on his law degree, and dating half the girls in the local town.
Maria and Conan seemed to be spending most of their spare time in the sack together.
They said that they were too much in love to risk spoiling it by getting married.
Quincy and Zuzanna had been comfortably married for fifty years. He spent much of
his time teaching the martial arts and The Way Of The Warrior to the recruits, and
anybody else who was interested, including me. Zuzanna usually lived in a sort of
pseudo-medieval world filled with castles, knights, and dragons, where magic worked
and she was a great warlock.
Dream World could be pretty much whatever you wanted it to be, provided you
obeyed orders.
We old hands got together fairly often, socially, and when we did, the intelligent
computers in our tanks were always invited. Mine was named Agnieshka. She was a
beautiful woman in Dream World, and a good friend of my wife. Kasia's tank was Eva, a
slender Irish girl with huge green eyes. She was equipped with a rail gun for this mission,
rather than her usual X-ray laser. When their training schedules permitted, the recruits
and their tanks were invited along as well.
Of course, I saw to it that we spent enough time preparing for the upcoming battle,
and making sure that everyone knew what our objectives were. They all knew precisely
what to do, for at least the first few seconds, at which time I privately expected the battle
plan to go west.
They always do.
After that, well, you improvise a lot.
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