"Keith Laumer - Bolos 9 - Bolo Strike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

ambushers until they could again slip into the relative safety of hyper.
Another volley of incoming kinetic-kill missiles loosed shattering
radiance within the infalling coterie of warships, peeling back armor in
half-molten strips, shattering the hull of the destroyer Tubek. The
battlecarrier Esan shuddered as multiple warheads vented their hellish
fury scant kilometers from her hull; battlescreens failed, and a second
volley sent a storm of hard gamma radiation sleeting through her crew
modules. Every man and woman aboard was dead when the leviathan
vessel detonated as a tiny sun minutes later.
The surviving vessels were clear of the first onslaught now and
racing for the minimum distance beyond the local gravity well where they
could kick over into hyper and vanish. Dis wielded an immense influence
over local space, however, and at maximum acceleration, Galahedron
and the destroyer Kurbal would need another hour at least to work their
way clear.
The second flight of needle interceptors raced in from a quartet of
Aetryx battlecarriers in close orbit over Caern . . . blunt-nosed
penetrators flashing in at accelerations so high they could only be robotic
or manned by suicide crews. Galahedron survived until she was
sweeping in periplanetos past Dis, skimming the hydrogen fringe of the
gas giant's upper atmosphere . . . and then a barrage of missiles hunted
her down in a blaze of thermonuclear fury. The radiation storm touched
the hurtling Kurbal, burning out secondary drives and knocking her
weapons off-line, but her captain kicked in auxiliaries to stabilize her fall
and let the massive gravitational drag of Dis slingshot his hell-scorched
vessel clear of the planet. The interceptors followed but were too far
astern now to have a chance of closing to complete their kill. Ninety-eight
minutes after the engagement began, Kurbal slipped into hyper, the sole
survivor of BTF-74.
 Admiral Cellini had been sister-in-law to the Senate president. The
firestorm that erupted within the Confederation Senate upon Kurbal's
return to her base at Endymion far surpassed the pyrotechnics that
attended the destruction of the Galahedron.
Chapter One
Input . . .
Somewhere beyond the sphere of my awareness a switch is thrown,
power flows through control umbilicals, and I return to full consciousness
at Status Ready-Three. It is 2712.78 hours, Confederation Standard Time,
on Day 410 of cy 381, some 515.92724 hours since I was powered down
for loading aboard the transport.
I initiate a status check. All primary and secondary power plants are
online at one hundred percent output, all offensive and defensive weapons
systems read fully operational at standby mode, and communications are
nominal, with clear channels and data feed lines both to the other
members of my unit and to the human component of the Invasion Strike
Force.
My visual feeds are offтАФI scarcely have need of sight while sealed
inside a Type 7 Assault Landing Pod within a transport cargo bayтАФbut I
can sense the life of the ship around me, and of my comrades, as the
Battalion is brought to full consciousness.