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

even GalTech batteries, ran out. "I suspect those guys were headed south towards our
target."
"What, exactly, are we supposed to do against a globe, Jake?" Mueller asked. But,
nonetheless, he headed down the slope to the south.
The week before one of the gigantic "battleglobes" of the Posleen invader had been
detected in a landing pattern. The vessel had landed with more control than normal for
the Posleen. Usually the landings were more or less at random but this globe landed in
one of the few areas in the Eastern U.S. that was not covered by heavy fire; the Planetary
Defense Center that would have interfered with the landing had been destroyed before
completion.
The globes were made up of thousands of smaller vessels from multiple worlds.
They formed at predetermined deep-space rendezvous then proceeded to the target planet.
When they reached the outer strands of the atmosphere the globes broke up and the
subvessels, Lampreys and Command Dodecahedrons, would fan out in a giant circle
around the landing target.
 It was one of these that had landed somewhere around the already conquered
Clarkesville, Georgia. And it was the LRRP's job to find it and find out where the forces
from it were going.
So far it looked like they were gathering forces, not leaving. Which was, to say the
least, unusual.
"First we find it," said Mosovich. "Then we figure out what to do."
Finding it would be difficult. There were parties of Posleen moving everywhere
throughout the rugged countryside. Since the centauroid Posleen found mountains
difficult, that meant they were confined to the roads. That meant in turn that the LRRP
team had to be careful to avoid roads. The best way to do that would have been to "ridge
run"тАФfollow ridges from hilltop to hilltop. However, the general trend of the ridges in
the North Georgia hills was from east to west, rather than north to south. Thus the team
had to first climb up one ridge, averaging from two to six hundred feet, then down the
other side. In the valley they would carefully cross the inevitable stream and road, then
ascend the next ridge.
Mosovich took them wide off of Highway 441, descending from their perch on
Black Rock Mountain and down into the wilderness around Stonewall Creek. The pine
and oak woods were shrouded in a medieval darkness; the background light of
civilization had been extinguished for years. The primeval woods rustled with wildlife
and in the hills south of Tiger Creek they startled up a herd of bedding deer that must
have numbered in the hundreds.
Up the hill from Tiger Creek Mueller stopped and raised a hand. From ahead there
was a low, constant rustling. He crept forward, cranking up the gain on the light
amplification goggles.
When he saw the first of the beasts climbing laboriously out of a ten foot high
mound of dirt, he just nodded and backed up. He looked at Mosovich and gestured to the
south, indicating that they needed to go around. At Mosovich's gesture of inquiry he held
out two fingers, formed in a V and curved down, then gestured as if driving them at the
ground. The sergeant major nodded and gestured to the south as well; nobody wanted to
go through an abat meadow.
The creatures were one of the pests brought by the Posleen. Like the Posleen they
were omnivorous and capable of surviving on Terran vegetation. They were about the
size of rabbits, white and looked somewhat like a cross between a rat and a pillbug. They
moved like a rabbit, hopping along on a single rear leg that had a broad, flexible pod-
foot. Individually they were inoffensive and, unlike Posleen, fully edible to humans;