"Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 2 - The Gates of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

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that, second-degree burns up through a light singe to no effect."

"Now's your chance. Rush them. You can kill all five with one sweep before they know what's going
on."

Wolff sighed. There would have been a time when he would not even have waited for Vala's urgings.
He would have killed them all by now and been tempted to continue the work with Vala and Rin-trah.
But he was no longer Jadawin; he was Robert Wolff. Vala would not understand this, or if she did,
she would see his hesitation as a weakness. He did not want to kill, but he doubted that there was
any way of forcing the abutal to call off their attack. Vala knew these people, and she was
probably telling him the truth about them. So, like it or not, he had to take sides.

There was a yell behind them. Wolff rolled over and sat up to see three more abutal warriors about
forty feet from them. They had burst out from behind a frond and were charging towards them, their
javelins raised.

Wolff twisted around to face the three abutal, and he pressed on a plate on the underside of the
three-foot long barrel. A dazzling white ray, pencil-thick, traced across the bellies of all
three. The vegetation between and in back of them smoked. The three fell forward, the jav-elins
dropping from their hands, and they slid on the grass, face down.

Wolff rose to one knee, turned, and faced the five. The two archers stopped and took aim. Wolff
dropped them first, then the other three. He continued to crouch and looked about him for others
who might have been attracted by the cries. Only the wind through the fronds and the hushed cries
and muffled explosions of the battle at the vil-lage could be heard.

The odor of burned flesh sickened him. He rose and turned over the three corpses, then the five.
He did not think that any were still alive, but he wanted to make sure. Each was almost cut in
half by the beam. The skin along the gashes was crisped under the blood. There was not much blood,
since the energy of the beam, absorbed by the bodies, had cooked their lungs and intestines. Their
bowels, contracting, had ejected their contents.

Vala looked at the beamer. She was very curious but knew better than to ask Wolff if she could
handle it. "You have two settings," she said. "What can it do on full power?"

"It can cut through a ten-foot slab of steel," he replied. "But the charge won't last more than
sixty seconds. On half-power, it can project for ten minutes before needing recharging."

She looked at his pockets, and he smiled. He had no intention of telling her how many fresh
charges were in his pockets.

"What happened to your weapons?" he said.

Vala cursed and said, "They were stolen while we slept. I don't know whether Urizen or that slimy
Theotormon did it."