"Keith Laumer - Bolos 8 - Bolo Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

East and north were more ruins, endless kilometers of them, occupied by uncounted thousands of
scavenging alien machines and by the machines' constructs, bizarre and inexplicable shapes and
structures seemingly grown from the city rubble. There was no escape in that direction.

Overlook Hill, to the west of the camp, offered the only real hope of escape, the more so because
buildings and the Coastal Highway to the northwest had been

29 in the shadow of Overlook Hill when the meteor fell. The slaves, more than once in the past
year, had discussed the best way to get clear of Celeste and the occupying army of machines; an
escape overland northwest was clearly the best option.

The only thing in the way was the Bolo.

Jaime reached the edge of the larger rubble just below the crest of the hill, lying on his belly
as he studied the crouching machine. By the light of Delamar in the east, he could just make out
the massive, hulking sprawl of the thing, a long, flat body supported by six sets of double
tracks, three to a side. Each road wheel was better than two meters tall, and the slabs of meter-
thick duralloy armor sloped and angled above the monster's skirts like the faceted cliff sides of
a small mountain.



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The Bolo Mark XXXIII, series HCT Hecate, was the largest and most powerful ground weapon ever
constructed by humankind. It massed 32,000 tons, as much as a fair-sized star cruiser, and its
primary armament was more in keeping with spaceborne naval forces than with ground armorтАФthree
squat turrets, each as big as a house, each mounting a 200cm Hellbore, a weapon better suited for
battleships and combat in the wide reaches of deep space than for any planetary surf ace. Rows of
ball turrets along both flanks, twenty in all, mounted 20cm Hellbore infinite repeatersтАФweapons
that, back in the era of the Mark XIV Bolo, would each have been considered primary weapons in
their own right. Tertiary support weapons included a VLS missile system, a battery of 240cm
howitzers, and 40cm BL mortars incorporated into a true planetary siege platform. Its designers
had been confident that Bolo Hecate was easily the most powerful military ground weapon in the
galaxy.

They'd been wrong, of course. Hector, as the CDF had nicknamed the machine, had gone into battle
against the clacker landing boats hours after the destruction of Celeste and had ceased operations
only minutes later. The enemy had taken Hector out with terrifying ease. More terrifying still had
been the ease with which they'd circumvented the Bolo's programming, turning it from a human
weapon into one of their mindless, mechanical creatures, an automaton hooked into the Master's
planet-girdling, cybernetic web. Hector was back in service now, but he was working for the enemy.
Humans who approached too closely, or who tried to escape past the Bolo, were chopped down by
hypervelocity antipersonnel flechettes.

Clearly, the clackers could have reduced Hector to scrap if they'd wanted. Was there another clue
here to the enemy's weakness? Jaime wondered. That monster on the hilltop represented 32,000 tons
of duralloy, ceramplast laminates, and other high-tech materials, including refined metals ranging
from steel to appreciable amounts of technetium, praseodymium, and ytterbium. Simply by junking