"Sara Douglass - Redemption 3 - Crusader" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

The ten thousand were those left sane, of course. There were still countless millions left roaming
above ground, their minds completely unhinged, utterly demonised, noisily breeding тАФ and entirely
successfully тАФ countless millions- of genetically insane babies. Those infants that survived their first five
years uneaten (or only partially eaten), grew into even worse monsters than their parents.
Fischer shuddered. The insane (and by now there were billions of them) were still out there, haunting
the as yet unreclaimed surface of the planet.
He and his companions might have managed to trap and dismember Qeteb, but the other five
Demons continued to howl their destructive way about the planet.
They had trapped and dismembered Qeteb, but not destroyed him.
This was the problem Fischer and his companions now faced. What to do? What to do?
"The other Demons will break through the barriers within the month," said Katrina Fielding, Henry's
wife. She'd been the one to suggest the idea that the Demons could be trapped by reflecting their own
malevolence back at them.
Fischer glanced at her. She was young, in her early forties, a mere child when the Demons had first
 dropped in.
She'd lived virtually her entire life underground, and it showed. Katrina's shoulders and spine were
stunted, her eyes dull, her skin pallid and flaky. She'd never been able to have children.
And after the initial years underground only a scattering of babies, mostly physically or mentally
disabled, had been born to the few women who came to term.
We're dying, Fischer thought. Our entire race. The Demons will get us in the end, even if it may
take them a generation or two longer than those they cornered above ground. If the Demons
don't leave soon then no-one will be left who can breed!
No-one sane, that is. The insane hordes above ground multiplied themselves with no effort,
and certainly no thought, at all.
The idea terrified Fischer. "Whatever we do," he said, "we've got to get rid both of Qeteb's damned
death-defying life parts, and the other five Demons as well."
"There is only the one solution," Henry said. "Devereaux's proposal."
Devereaux's proposal frightened Fischer almost as much as the idea that the sane component of the
human race would soon die out, leaving earth populated by the maniacal human hybrids (God knows
with what they had interbred upstairs!). But a decision had to be made, and soon.
Why, why, why, Fischer thought, is there no government left to make this decision for us? Why
couldn't we leave it to a bunch of anonymously corrupted politicians to foul up so we can be left with the
comfort of blaming someone else?
But there were no nations, no governments, no presidents, no prime ministers, no goddamn
potentates left to shoulder the responsibility. There was only Fischer and his committee.
And Devereaux. Polite, charming, helpful Devereaux, who had advised that they just load Qeteb's
life parts on separate spaceships (how convenient that the people inhabiting the bunkers when
the Demons had initially arrived tended to be the military and space types) and flee into space.
"Drop them off somewhere else," Devereaux had said only the day before yesterday. "Or at the
least, just keep going. The other Demons are bound to follow."
"What if Devereaux finds a place to leave them?" said Jane Havers, the only other woman present.
"Or just crashes into some distant planet or moon. What then?"
"We pray that whoever inhabits that moon or planet can deal with the Demons better than we
have," Katrina said. "At least it won't be in our solar system, or galaxy."
Fischer dropped his face in a hand and rubbed his forehead. Cancer was eating away in his belly,
and he knew he would be dead within weeks. Best to take the decision now, before he was dead, and
while there were still women within their community with viable wombs.
Somehow the human race had to continue.
"Send for Devereaux," he said.