"David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 02 - Cross The Stars (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Instead of clearing the monster as he had intended, the man landed on the blotchy carapace. His feet slid out from
under him. The carnivore was trying to arch its center segments from the trench. Its weight pinned SladeтАЩs shins to
the soft loam. The laborer scuttled safely behind the bole of a tree. The leg whose wild thrashings had endangered
the native now recoiled toward the man. The creatureтАЩs optic nerves and central ganglion had been destroyed, but its
autonomic nervous system was making a successful attempt to heave the great body erect reflexively.
The powergun would have been useless even if Slade still held it. The carnivore was dead, but only time or a
nuclear weapon would keep its corpse from being dangerous. Slade grabbed the limb as it swung for him. His biceps
swelled as they directed the pincers down onto the dirt a handтАЩs breadth short of his chest. They dug into the soil like
the recoil spades of projectile artillery. That gave the leg purchase against the massive thrust it exerted a moment
later.
The creature squirmed wholly clear of the trench. Its meter-thick body carried Slade up with it as its weight
released him. There were tiny chitinous projections where the carapace armor joined that of the belly. They flayed
the big manтАЩs calves through the tough, loose trousers that had covered them.
 Slade threw himself out of the way. He was limited to the strength of his upper body because his legs were still
numb. The creature was squirming off mindlessly into the jungle like a giant centipede. One of the legs of a rear
segment still impaled a laborer. The corpseтАЩs drag kept that limb out of synchrony with the fluttering fore-and-aft
motion of the others. The body segment itself twitched out of the line the remainder of the creature was trying to
take.
In the dirt behind the carnivore dangled its sting. The plates that should have held and directed the weapon were
shattered. Chartreuse venom still dripped and left a dark trail on the ground. In the wake of the creatureтАЩs clattering
exit, the jungle came alive with the moans of injured laborers.
Slade staggered to the fallen bundle that held the main medical supplies. When he had an opportunity, he would
do something about the bloody agony of his own calves. They would waitтАФwould have to waitтАФfor Slade to treat
the laborers who were already going into shock from trauma or poisoning.
The Citadel was temporarily only a memory behind a curtain of sweat and adrenalin.
 CHAPTER THREE
At the top of her tower, the Terzia shuddered because a human would have shuddered in reaction to the scene she
had watched. The breaking earth, the pincers stabbing upward with enough force to penetrate wood . . . the venom
drifting forward in a haze, burning like lava the bare flesh it contacted. . . .
Everything that happened was out of her control once it began. But the danger had to be real or the exercise was
pointless . . . as it seemed to be pointless anyway, to judge from the bleakness of SladeтАЩs remarks to Bedyle.
The TerziaтАЩs awareness extended across all the life forms native to the planet. She watched from her tower and
through the eyes of the laborers in SladeтАЩs gang, both the hale and the dying. When the brain-blasted carnivore
stumbled against the tree trunk, the Terzia felt the impact both through the chitin and through the bark. Sunshine and
stargiow, breezes and rain all over the world simultaneously, were as much a part of her consciousness as was her
terror of a moment before.
Like the wind, the chime of the Stadtler Communications Device was a stimulus external to the Terzia in all her
facets. The human simulacrum in the tower turned the unit across from her in the open room.
The Stadtler Device consisted of a massive chair which faced a niche surrounded by a bank of cabinets. The
smooth surfaces of chair and cabinets covered electronics as sophisticated as any other array in the present human
universe. There was, in fact, no certainty that the original provenance of Stadtler Devices was human at all. A
glaucous light on one chair-arm pulsed in harmony with the three-note chime.
The Terzia stepped toward the unit without hesitation and without any dimming of her awareness of every other
factor sensed by the planetтАЩs native life. Stadtler Devices were almost solely the prerogative of governments, and
generally governments of the richest worlds and nations. The units, built on or at least shipped from Stadtler,
provided instantaneous communications over astronomical distancesтАФat astronomical cost. A planet like Terzia
could scarcely have afforded such a bauble, were Terzia not capable of directing its entire volume of extra-planetary
exchange in as narrow a focus as it desired.
The Terzia seated herself in the chair. She touched the light to end its pulsing and to activate the projection
circuits of the device. Her garment swirled as she moved. The fabric appeared to be layers of diaphanous gauze,