"Applegate, Katherine A - Animorphs - 26 - The Attack" - читать интересную книгу автора (Applegate Katherine A)

"Yeah, right," Marco said. But he looked. And I looked.

"Erek," I said as calmly as I could, "are you joking?"

His projected face was white. I wondered how much of projecting an
emotion was automatic with him after so long as a human.

"I am not joking, Jake," he said. "That is a Howler."

50

The Howler was moving up the stairway. We were moving down. We froze.
The Howler kept coming.

He was not huge. Smaller than a Hork-Bajir. As big as a large man. He
walked on two bowed legs with a swinging, almost comic gait. He had two
arms, longer than his legs. The hands were almost human, five fingers
and an opposable thumb. But from the wrists projected a sort of second
hand, a claw that could be lowered to cover the back of the hand, or
kept up out of the way. This claw had four hooked, steel-tipped claws.

It looked like there was a bearing halfway up

51 his body, as if the top half of the torso was on a living lazy Susan,
allowing the body to turn all the way around and keep the fighting claws
in the game.

The head was ugly, a slag heap of melted-looking, black pebbled skin.
The entire creature looked like he had been formed out of still-cooling
lava. Beneath the black, in the cracks and creases of his flesh, were
lines of bright red.

Within this face were eyes of a startlingly beautiful blue. Robin's egg
blue, they call it. The entire eye was blue, with the cat's iris a paler
shade.

The Howler seemed indifferent to us. Didn't care. Wasn't concerned.

He wore a series of loose belts around his torso, and each of these
featured a different weapon. Or at least they looked like weapons.
Something similar to a Dracon beam, what might almost have been an
automatic pistol, knives, small metallic boomerangs, a gun that seemed
loaded with darts.

He was a walking arsenal.

I looked back at Erek, above me on the stairs. His face was flickering.
In and out. Not with emotion. With simple loss of control. The android
under the hologram kept peeking out.