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

The night sky over the ruins of Clayton, Georgia, was rent by fire as a brigade's
worth of artillery filled the air with shrapnel. The purple-orange light of the variable time
rounds revealed the skeleton of a shelled-out Burger King and the scurrying centauroid
shapes of the Posleen invaders.
The crocodile-headed aliens scattered under the hammer of the guns and Sergeant
Major Mosovich grinned at the metronomic firing of the team sniper. There had been
three God Kings leading the Posleen battalion, what the invaders called an "oolt'ondar," a
unit over size varying from a human battalion to a division. Two of the three leader castes
had been tossed from their saucer-shaped antigrav craft with two precisely targeted
rounds before the last had increased the speed of his saucer-shaped craft and flown
quickly out of sight. Once he was gone the sniper began working on the Posleen
"normals."
The rest of Long Range Reconnaissance Team Five held its fire. Unlike the sniper,
with his match-grade .50 caliber rifle, the tracers from the rest of the team would be sure
to give them away. And then it would be wheat against the scythe; even without their
leaders, the battalion of semi-intelligent normals would be able to wipe a LRRP team off
the map.
So they directed and corrected the artillery barrage until all of the remaining aliens
had scattered out of sight.
"Good shoot," Mueller said, quietly, glancing at the dozens of horse-sized bodies
scattered on the roads. The big, blond master sergeant had been fighting or training to
fight the Posleen since before most of the world knew they existed. Like Mosovich he
had seen most of the bad, and what little good, there had been of the invasion.
When they first got orders to fire up any targets of opportunity while on patrols it
did not seem to be a good idea. He'd been chased by the Posleen before and it was no fun.
The aliens were faster and had more endurance than humans; getting them off your trail
required incredible stealth or sufficient firepower.
However, the invaders never seemed to sustain any pursuit beyond certain zones,
and the LRRPs had sufficient firepower to wipe out most of their pursuers. So now they
took every chance they could to "fire-up" the invaders. And, truth be told, they took a
certain perverse satisfaction from a good artillery shoot.
"Took 'em long enough," Sergeant Nichols groused. The E-5 was a recent transfer
from the Ten Thousand. Like all the Spartans the sergeant was as hard as the barrel of his
sniper rifle. But he had a lot to learn about being beyond the Wall.
"Arty's usually late," said Mueller, getting to his feet. Like the sniper, the team
second, who always took point, was draped in a ghillie cloak. The dangling strips of
cloth, designed to break up the human outline and make a soldier nearly invisible in the
brush, were occasionally a pain. But it was manifestly useful in hiding the oversized
master sergeant.
The lines along the Eastern seaboard had been stable for nearly two years. Each side
had strengths and weaknesses and the combination had settled into stalemate.
The Posleen had extremely advanced weaponry, hundreds of generations better than
the humans. Their light-weight hypervelocity missiles could open up a main battle tank or
a bunker like a tin can and every tenth "normal" carried one. The plasma cannons and
heavy railguns mounted on the God King's saucers were nearly as effective and the
sensor suite on each saucer swept the air clear of any aircraft or missile that crested the
horizon.
In addition to their technological edge they outnumbered the human defenders. The
five invasion waves that had hit Earth, and the numerous "minor" landings in between,