"Drake, David - Redliners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Horgen had the truck up to forty miles an hour. Immediately ahead
the hangar door closed with a rattle that Abbado hoped meant it
was fairly flimsy. "Hang on, boys!" he said as he pulled himself
into the cab and crossed his arms over his faceshield. "The
party's about to start!"

They hit the quivering door with a crash louder than the battle
going on all over the spaceport.



Each of the two 16-round cannisters of plasma cartridges weighed
a hair over forty pounds, and there was the weight of the air-
cushion dolly besides. Striker Esther Meyer liked to tell herself
she was as tough as any man in C41, but right at the moment she
was glad Sergeant-Gunner Bloch and Santini, the other loader,
had paused to lift her dolly from the hold instead of leaving her to
struggle with it alone. Meyer could keep moving despite the heat
and constriction of her hard suit as long as anybody, sure; but
hefting a full ammo dolly was largely a matter of mass and peak
strength.

Stingers and the 4-pound rockets most strikers slung from their
belts already raked the port area. Fourth Platoon (Heavy
Weapons) was the last out of the ship. With their full armor and
bulky loads they'd have needlessly slowed less heavily equipped
strikers.

There was no return fire as yet but it'd come soon enough. When
it did, the maneuver platoons would be damned glad of 50-pound
missile launchers and the plasma cannon.

Sergeant Bloch was a big man who looked gigantic in his polished
white armor. His dolly supported the cannon itself and a three-
round belt of ready cartridges. Twenty yards to the northeast was
a pit holding a transformer beneath surface level where it didn't
interfere with starships being hauled across the port in giant
cradles. Bloch hunched toward it at a dead run. The pit was the
best cover in his sector.

All Fourth Platoon personnel wore hard suits. The crews handling
the triple launchers had to worry about the backblast of their own
heavy missiles, and a mist of ions as hot as a sun's corona bathed
the cannoneers as soon as they began to fire their belt-fed
weapons. The armor's protection from enemy counterfire was a
secondary concern.

Meyer heard the high-pitched scream of Spook lasers in addition
to the snarl of stingers and the crackWHAM! of the strikers'