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

Haze blurred the landing field. It was a mix of ozone from powergun bolts and the coils of the
slug-throwers, burning paint and burning uniforms, and gases from superheated disks that had held the
copper atoms in alignment: empties ejected from the tribarrels. Some of the victims were fat enough that
their flesh burned also.

The dirigible that'd carried the attackers into position now fled north as fast as the dozen engines podded
on outriggers could push it. That wasn't very fast, even with the help of the breeze to swing the big
vessel's bow; they couldn't possibly escape.

Huber wondered for a moment how he could contact the dirigible's crew and order them to set down or
be destroyed. Plattner's World probably had emergency frequencies, but the data hadn't been
downloaded to F-3's data banks yet.

Sergeant Jellicoe raked the dirigible's cabin with her tribarrel. The light-metal structure went up like
fireworks in the cyan bolts. An instant later all eight gunners in the platoon were firing, and the driver of
Floosie was shooting a pistol with one hand as he steered his car down the ramp with the other.

"Cease fire!" Huber shouted, not that it was going to make the Devil's bit of difference. "Unit, cease fire
now !"

The dirigible was too big for the powerguns to destroy instantly, but the bolts had stripped away swathes
of the outer shell and ruptured the ballonets within. Deseau had guessed right: the dirigible got its lift from
hydrogen, the lightest gas and cheap enough to dump and replace after every voyage so that the ballonets
didn't fill with condensed water over time.

The downside was the way it burned.

Flames as pale and blue as a drowned woman's flesh licked from the ballonets, engulfing the middle of
the great vessel. The motors continued to drive forward, but the stern started to swing down as fire
sawed the airship in half. The skeleton of open girders showed momentarily, then burned away.

"Oh bloody buggering Hell!" Huber said. He idledFencing Master 's fans and stood up on the seat. "
Hell!"

"What's the matter, sir?" Learoyd asked. He'd lost his helmet, but he and Sergeant Deseau both were at
their combat stations. The tribarrels spun in use, rotating a fresh bore up to fire while the other two
cooled. Even so the barrels still glowed yellow from their long bursts. "They were hostiles too, the good
Lord knows."
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"Theywere," Huber said grimly. "But the folks living around here are the ones who've hired us."

The remaining ballonets in the dirigible's bow exploded simultaneously, flinging blobs of burning metal
hundreds of meters away. Fires sprang up from the treetops, crackling and spewing further showers of
sparks.