"Eric Nylund - Halo - The Fall Of Reach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nylund Eric)

“Contact. All teams stand by: enemy contact, my position.”

The Chief knew there were probably more than a hundred of them—motion sensors were off the scale.
He wanted to see them for himself, though; his training made that lesson clear: “Machines break. Eyes
don’t.”

The four Spartans that composed Blue Team covered his back, standing absolutely silent and immobile
in their MJOLNIR combat armor. Someone had once commented that they looked like Greek war gods
in the armor . . . but his Spartans were far more effective and ruthless than Homer’s gods had ever been.

He snaked the fiber-optic probe up and over the three-meter-high stone ridge. When it was in place, the
Chief linked it to his helmet’s heads-up display.

On the other side he saw a valley with eroded rock walls and a river meandering through it . . . and
camped along the banks as far as he could see were Grunts.

The Covenant used these stocky aliens as cannon fodder. They stood a meter tall and wore armored
environment suits that replicated the atmosphere of their frozen homeworld. They reminded the Chief of
biped dogs, not only in appearance, but because their speech—even with the new translation software—
was an odd combination of high-pitched squeaks, guttural barks, and growls.

They were about as smart as dogs, too. But what they lacked in brainpower, they made up for in sheer
tenacity. He had seen them hurl themselves at their enemies until the ground was piled high with their
corpses . . . and their opponents had depleted their ammunition.

These Grunts were unusually well armed: needlers, plasma pistols, and there were four stationary
plasma cannons. Those could be a problem.

One other problem: there were easily a thousand of them.

This operation had to go off without a hitch. Blue Team’s mission was to draw out the Covenant rear
guard and let Red Team slip through in the confusion. Red Team would then plant a HAVOK tactical
nuke. When the next Covenant ship landed, dropped its shields, and started to unload its troops, they’d
get a thirty-megaton surprise.

The Chief detached the optics and took a step back from the rock wall. He passed the tactical
information along to his team over a secure COM channel.

“Four of us,” Blue-Two whispered over the link. “And a thousand of them? Piss-poor odds for the little
guys.”

“Blue-Two,” the Chief said, “I want you up with those Jackhammer launchers. Take out the cannons and
soften the rest of them. Blue-Three and Five, you follow me up—we’re on crowd control. Blue-Four:
you get the welcome mat ready. Understood?”

Four blue lights winked on his heads-up display as his team acknowledged the orders.

“On my mark.” The Chief crouched and readied himself. “Mark!”