"John Ringo - The Legacy of the Aldenata 3 - When the Devil D" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

"It's how you know it's serious," Pappas joked. "If CONARC turns up the shit has
truly hit the fan."
"I also notice that there are no artillery units responsive to calls for fire."
"They're working on that."
"And that both flanking divisions are defined by Shelly as 'shaky.' "
"Well, they're Army, ain't they?" the former Marine chuckled. "Army's always
defined as 'shaky.' It's the default setting."
Artillery fire dropped on the rickety pontoon bridge and the wood and aluminum
structure disintegrated.
"See?" said O'Neal. "They didn't really need us."
"Horner wants a counterattack."
O'Neal turned around to see if the sergeant major was joking but the broad, sallow
face was deadpanned. "Are you serious?"
"As a heart attack. I thought that was what you was bitching about."
"Holy shit," the major whispered. He reached down and put on his helmet then
shook his head to get a good seal on the underlayer. The gel flowed over his face filling
every available crevice then drew back from mouth, nostrils and eyes. The Moment, as it
was known, took a long time to get over and a lifetime to adjust to. "Holy shit.
Counterattack. Grand. With Slight in command I presume? Great. Time to go pile up the
breach with our ACS dead."
"Smile when you say that, sir," the NCO said, putting on his own helmet. "Once
more into the breach."
 "That's 'unto,' you illiterate Samoan, and I am smiling," O'Neal retorted. He rotated
his body sideways, turning the snarling face of his battle armor towards the sergeant
major. "See?"
***
"Gotta love his armor," Cutprice chuckled.
"I wish I had a thousand sets," Horner admitted. "But I'd settle for a thousand
regular sets so that's not saying much."
The armor was a private gift to then-Captain O'Neal from the Indowy manufacturer
and included all the "special" functions that he had requested when he was a member of
the design group. Besides the additional firing ports on wrist and elbows for close range
combat, it was powered by antimatter. This eliminated the worst handicap of powered
armor, its relatively short combat range. Technically, standard armor was designed for
three hundred miles of range or seventy-two hours of static combat. In practice it had
turned out to be about half that. Several suit units had been caught when they simply "ran
out of gas" and were destroyed by the Posleen.
The drain on suit power had just gotten worse with the ammunition shortage.
Because it was impossible for any terrestrial factory to produce the standard ammunition,
which had a dollop of antimatter at the base to power the gun, it had been necessary to
substitute simple depleted-uranium teardrops. Thus the grav-gun, which should have been
powering itself, was forced to "suck" power from the suits. Since the rounds were still
accelerated to a fraction of lightspeed, and since that required enormous power, the "life"
of the suit batteries had been cut to nearly nothing. It was getting close to a choice of
shoot or move for most of the standard suits, the exception being O'Neal's, which had
almost unlimited power.
The flip side, of course, was that if anything ever penetrated to the antimatter
reservoir, Major O'Neal and a sizable percentage of the landscape for a mile around
would be vapor.
But all of those things were invisible. It was the "surface" that attracted attention;