"Robert A. Heinlein - Starship troopers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

reactions are faster and they can tolerate more gee. They can get in faster,
get out faster, and thereby improve everybody’s chances, yours as well as
theirs. But that still doesn’t make it fun to be slammed against your spine at
ten times your proper weight.
But I must admit that Captain Deladrier knows her trade. There was no
fiddling around once the Rodger Young stopped braking. At once I heard
her snap, „Center-line tube . . . fire!“ and there were two recoil bumps as
Jelly and his acting platoon sergeant unloaded—and immediately: „Port and
starboard tubes—automatic fire!“ and the rest of us started to unload.
Bump! and your capsule jerks ahead one place -- bump! and it jerks
again, precisely like cartridges feeding into the chamber of an old-style
automatic weapon. Well, that’s just what we were . . . only the barrels of the
gun were twin launching tubes built into a spaceship troop carrier and each
cartridge was a capsule big enough (just barely) to hold an infantryman with
all field equipment.
Bump! -- I was used to number three spot, out early; now I was Tail-End
Charlie, last out after three squads. It makes a tedious wait, even with a
capsule being fired every second; I tried to count the bumps -- bump!
(twelve) bump! (thirteen) bump! (fourteen—with an odd sound to it, the
empty one Jenkins should have been in) bump! --
And clang! -- it’s my turn as my capsule slams into the firing chamber
• then WHAMBO! the explosion hits with a force that makes the Captain’s
braking maneuver feel like a love tap.
 Then suddenly nothing.
Nothing at all. No sound, no pressure, no weight. Floating in darkness
. . . free fall, maybe thirty miles up, above the effective atmosphere, falling
weightlessly toward the surface of a planet you’ve never seen. But I’m not
shaking now; it’s the wait beforehand that wears. Once you unload, you
can’t get hurt -- because if anything goes wrong it will happen so fast that
you’ll buy it without noticing that you’re dead, hardly.
Almost at once I felt the capsule twist and sway, then steady down so that
my weight was on my back . . . weight that built up quickly until I was at my
full weight (0.87 gee, we had been told) for that planet as the capsule
reached terminal velocity for the thin upper atmosphere. A pilot who is a real
artist (and the Captain was) will approach and brake so that your launching
speed as you shoot out of the tube places you just dead in space relative to
the rotational speed of the planet at that latitude. The loaded capsules are
heavy; they punch through the high, thin winds of the upper atmosphere
without being blown too far out of position—but just the same a platoon is
bound to disperse on the way down, lose some of the perfect formation in
which it unloads. A sloppy pilot can make this still worse, scatter a strike
group over so much terrain that it can’t make rendezvous for retrieval,
much less carry out its mission. An infantryman can fight only if somebody
else delivers him to his zone; in a way I suppose pilots are just as essential
as we are.
I could tell from the gentle way my capsule entered the atmosphere that the
Captain had laid us down with as near zero lateral vector as you could ask
for. I felt happy—not only a tight formation when we hit and no time wasted,
but also a pilot who puts you down properly is a pilot who is smart and
precise on retrieval.