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

"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.
He waved back to us, but he was unable to go any farther.
Mirko shouted, "Both of his legs are broken! Somebody call for an ambulance!"
There are limits to what armor and fluid suspension can protect you from. But