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

The Assault Landing Pods were stacked in staggered arrays, two
racks of four files stacked three deep with space around each vessel to
allow all-round access by work pods and the intricate, drifting spaghetti
of power conduits and cable feeds.
A single Mark XXXIII Bolo massed 32,000 tonsтАФas much as a fair-
sized warshipтАФ120 meters long, 38 meters broad, and reaching 25
meters from ground to main deck, not counting the three squat and
massive turret housings for the machine's incredible main armament. A
Type 7 ALP was just large enough to house one such monster, 200
meters long overall, with a blunt, egg-shaped main pod and a trefoil drive
and maneuver assembly aft. The whole was clad in night-black
ceramplast, folded, studded, and embellished with sensor pods, drive
sponsons, and field projector arrays.
The Mark XXXIII was, in fact, the first Bolo mark possessing enough
internal contra-gravity generators to allow it to serve as its own landing
boat for planetary assault. The Confederation Navy was conservative,
however, heirs to the long-faded glories of the old Concordiat and of
near-mythic Earth, who tended to rely on hand-me-downs from earlier
ages rather than investing heavily in R&D. There were tried-and-true
advantages to using ALP variable-geometry landers, and the Navy wasn't
going to give them up.
Twenty-four ALPs filled the belly of the Confederation assault
transport Heritas, an entire brigade of Bolo planetary siege units. Beyond
the transport's outer hull, in the darkness of space about them, five more
brigades of Mark XXXIII Bolos rode toward Destiny aboard other
Shehuva-class star transports.
"They're impressive," Major Ramirez said after a moment. "And the
plan is good. Just so long as we don't forget just what it is we're up
against." She turned and peered closer at him. "Jon? Are you okay?"
He wiped his forehead, trying to steady the bounce he felt in his
shoulders, his gut. Okay? He felt fracting great!
But Carla didn't know about the euph and wouldn't understand if
she did.
"Fine," he said. "I'm fine." He checked the time on his implant. "Let's
go, Major. It's time for the final briefing."
They turned and strode off down the catwalk side by side, leaving the
enormous black pods and their shrouded charges in the floodlight-
starred darkness.
***
Major General Weslen Ricard Moberly was not a foolish man. He
knew exactly how complex was the task set before him, and he knew the
power of delegation and military staff command. As Confederation
Supreme Army Group Commander, he'd been given the special executive
title of Skymarshal and assigned the monumental task of organizing,
deploying, and directing a planetary invasion from space. To that end,
he'd marshaled a small army of tacticians, military theoreticians, and
techniciansтАФthe "T-cubes," as he referred to them in his frequent Fleet
e-memos.
Only through such an army, coordinated and accessed through the
flagship's VR net, could he hope to stay on top of the situation once it