"Drake, David - Redliners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David) Third Platoon clambered onto the back of the vehicle, shooting at
any visible Spook to keep the enemy's panic boiling. Horgen goosed the throttle. She steered east and accelerated without needing orders. The truck was a godsend if you believed in God, which Abbado more or less did. The navy flight crew had landed the captured freighter on the magnetic mass nearest the port's northwest corner according to plan. Abbado could see the sense of that, since the port garrison's compound and the administration building were immediately north of the site and the transient military barracks were adjacent on the west. The trouble was 3-3's objective, the huge maintenance hangar along the east edge of the field, was almost four hundred yards from the ship. That was a hell of a long way to run across bare concrete with a combat load. By the time the exhausted strikers got to the hangar, the Spooks would have had time to wake up. They were waking up already. A hundred-foot-wide segment of hangar door had been open when C41 appeared. It was closing now, rolling down from the building roof. "Don't stop!" Abbado said, not that there was any likelihood Horgen had planned to. windshield and sprayed a crackling burst from his stinger across the shadowed figures moving within the hangar. Two of them flopped to the ground; one sprang up again and limped out of sight behind his fellows. The stinger's coils accelerated 15-grain projectiles to 10,000 feet per second. The pellet wasn't effective beyond 500 yards, but the strikers carried rockets to handle the occasional distant target. Stingers had the impact of a grenade on a target at short range. With thousand-round ammo packs containing both pellets and a fresh power supply, they were the weapon of choice for the sudden assaults in which C41 specialized. The truck had a three-man cab, but the three weren't supposed to be humans in battle gear. The Kalendru were long-limbed, gray- skinned humanoids. From a distance they appeared hairless, but if you looked closely you saw that their skin was covered with fine down. Kalendru were on average taller, slimmer and significantly quicker than Terrans. Because Spooks weren't as strong, their troops carried lighter, less-powerful weapon loads. A striker learned fast, though, that if you missed your first shot the Spook was going to get in the second one. |
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