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.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlcharge and smash intoBravo like an avalanche.As long as they waited until Bravo was fully in thegroove it shouldn't matter.And so far all was in the green.A couple of the bridges were showing as questionable, the icons outlined inyellow.He didn't bother to try to find out why; his AID was processing datafrom a thousand sources and any of it could have led to that conclusion.Overthe last few years Shelly had become remarkably adept at gauging the qualityof units and if she said the bridges probably would take a bit longer thananticipated to move into the hot zone she was probably right.Another screenshowed the symbology for the Ten Thousand getting into position.There were high buildings across the river and he noted the fact thatKessentai on the heights were beginning to drop.The snipers of the TenThousand were obviously getting into the act, using both their own weapons andtripod mounted "teleoperated" systems.At those ranges, though, it wasunlikely that they could get rounds into the power storage compartments of thetenar, which was unfortunate; when one of the.50 caliber sniper rounds hitthe storage crystals the unstable matrix tended to turn into a good copy of afive-hundred-pound bomb.The battalion had reached the Conrail line, and he ordered a short stop to geteverything set.TheReapers, who had been responding to calls for fire all along, yanked chargingtubes out of the huge ammo baskets welded on their backs while the regular ACStroopers checked ammunition levels and shifted as necessary.The standardsuits carried hundreds of thousands of the depleted uranium teardrops but thegrav-guns fired nearly five hundred a second.This meant that the suittroopers occasionally had to worry about running out of ammunition, asituation that would have been considered impossible before the war.Bulbous bodied medic and engineer suits moved forward supplying additionalammunition to the fighters and checking on the dropped data links.Such damageusually meant that the trooper was terminal, aDRT or Dead Right There in the cold battlefield parlance of the medics, butoccasionally it was just massive suit damage that the trooper had survived.Inthat case, nine times out of ten, the medic would leave the trooper anyway.A few troopers had fallen back from the fight with serious injuries or damagedweapons.Usually anything that penetrated a suit was fatal, but, again, if thetrooper survived the initial shock the suits would keep them alive untilpickup, sealing the injury, debriding the wound, attacking infection andeither putting the trooper out or shutting down the nerve endings depending onthe tactical situation.And even such injuries as lost limbs were, at worst,an inconvenience as O'Neal was well aware; he came away fromDiess with only one functioning limb.Regeneration and Hiberzine were perhapsthe two greatest boons the Galactics had presented to humans and the suittroopers well knew it; most of the veterans had lost at least one limb at somepoint.Mike spit a bit of dip into a pocket in the undergel.The icons for thePosleen on the heights indicated that they were starting to get their shittogether.Among other things, there were signs of Kessentai goingground-mounted.If they were also smart enough to keep their crests down, thesnipers across the river were going to have a damned hard time spotting them.Even if the snipers could pick them out it was a bad sign.It meant there wasa God King who knew what he was doing and could command the obedience ofothers.Now was when the battalion was really going to earn its pay.Time toDance.* * *Duncan hunched forward and wished he could get a Marlboro in the suit.He'ddone it a couple of times before, but the suit had a hell of a time handlingthe fumes.The undergel acted.real strange for a couple of daysPage 29ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlafterwards [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]