"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 10 - Paying The Piper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

and faced with barrel-shaped osmium pellets. When the system was engaged, sensors triggered segments
of the explosive to send blasts of pellets out to meet and disrupt an incoming missile.

Fired manually, each segment acted as a huge shotgun. The clanging explosions chopped into cat food
everyone who stood within ten meters ofFencing Master . Huber got a whiff of sweetly-poisonous
explosive residues as his nose filters closed again. The screaming fans sucked away the smoke before he
could switch back to thermal imaging.

An attacker aboardFoghorn had seen the danger in time to duck into the fighting compartment; the
pellets scarred the car's armor but didn't penetrate it. The attacker rose, pointing his slugthrower down at
the hatch Huber hadn't had time to close. A tribarrel fromFencing Master decapitated the hostile.

A powergun converted a few precisely aligned copper atoms into energy which it directed down the
weapon's mirror-polished iridium bore. Each light-swift bolt continued in a straight line to its target,
however distant, and released its energy as heat in a cyan flash. A 2-cm round like those the tribarrels
fired could turn a man's torso into steam and fire; the 20-cm bolt from a tank's main gun could split a
mountain.

One of the shipping containers was still jammed halfway open. Soldiers were climbing out like worms
squirming up the sides of a bait can. Two raised their weapons when they saw a tribarrel slewing in their
direction. Ravening light slashed across them, flinging their maimed bodies into the air. The steel container
flashed into white fireballs every time a bolt hit it.

Huber's ears were numb. It looked like the fighting was over, but he was afraid to shut downFencing
Master 's fans just in case he was wrong; it was easier to keep the car up than it'd be to raise her again
from a dead halt. He did back off the throttles slightly to bring the fans down out of the red zone, though.
The bow skirt tapped and rose repeatedly, like a chicken drinking.

Flame Farterpulled into the freighter's hatchway and dipped to slide down the ramp under full control.
Platoon Sergeant Jellicoe was behind the central tribarrel. She'd commandeered the leading car when the
shooting started rather than wait for her ownFloosie to follow out of the hold.

Jellicoe fired at something out of sight beyond the shipping containers. Huber touched the menu,
importing the view from Jellicoe's gunsight and expanding it to a quarter of his screen.
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Three attackers stood with their hands in the air; their weapons were on the gravel behind them. Jellicoe
had plowed up the ground alongside to make sure they weren't going to change their minds.

Mercenaries fought for money, not principle. The Slammers and their peers took prisoners as a matter of
policy, encouraging their opponents toward the same professional ideal.

Enemies who killed captured Slammers could expect to be slaughtered man, woman and child; down to
the last kitten that mewled in their burning homes.

"Bloody Hell . . ." Huber muttered. He raised the seat to look out at the shattered landscape with his
own eyes, though the filters still muffled his nostrils.