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

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