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

hold. Huber mountedFencing Master 's bow slope with a jump and a quick step. He dabbed a hand
down and the blast-heated armor burned him. He'd have blisters in the morning, if he lived that long.

Huber thought the driver's compartment was empty, but Kolbe's body from the shoulders on down had
slumped onto the floor. Huber bent through the hatch and grabbed him. The driver's right arm came off
when Huber tugged.

Huber screamed in frustration and threw the limb out of the vehicle, then got a double grip on Kolbe's
equipment belt and hauled him up by it. Bracing his elbows for leverage, Huber pulled the driver's torso
and thighs over the coaming and let gravity do the rest. The body slithered down the bow, making room
for Huber inside. The compartment was too tight to share with a corpse and still be able to drive.

Kolbe had raised the seat so that he could sit with his head out of the vehicle. Huber dropped it because
he wanted the compartment's full-sized displays instead of the miniature versions his faceshield would
provide. The slugs whipping around the hold would've been a consideration if he'd had time to think
about it, but right now he had more important things on his mind than whether he was going to be alive in
the next millisecond.

"All Fox elements!" he shouted, his helmet still cued to the unit push. Half a dozen troopers were talking
at the same time; Huber didn't know if anybody would hear the order, but they were mostly veterans and
ought to react the right way without a lieutenant telling them what that was. "Bring your cars on line and
engage the enemy!"
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Arne Huber was F-3's platoon leader, not a driver, but right now the most critical task the platoon faced
was getting the damaged, crewless, combat car out of the way of the two vehicles behind it. With
Fencing Master blocking the hatch, the attackers would wipe out the platoon like so many bugs in a
killing bottle. Huber was the closest trooper to the job, so he was doing it.

The fusion bottle that powered the vehicle was on line. Eight powerful fans in nacelles underFencing
Master 's hull sucked in outside air and filled the steel-skirted plenum chamber at pressure sufficient to lift
the car's thirty tonnes. Kolbe had switched the fans on but left them spinning at idle, their blades set at
zero incidence, while the spacers freed the turnbuckle.

Huber palmed the combined throttles forward while his thumb adjusted blade incidence in concert. As
the fusion bottle fed more power to the nacelles, the blades tilted on their axes so that they drove the air
rather than merely cutting it. Fan speed remained roughly constant, butFencing Master shifted greasily as
her skirts began to lift from the freighter's deck.

A second buzzbomb hit the bow.

For an instant, Huber's mind went as blank as the white glare of the blast. The shock curtains in the
driver's compartment expanded, and his helmet did as much as physics allowed to save his head. Despite
that, his brain sloshed in his skull.

He came around as the shock curtains shrank back to their ready state. He didn't know who or where
he was. The display screen before him was a gray, roiling mass. He switched the control to thermal