"Alan Dean Foster - Aliens Vs Predator - War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

but in a wave; there was no lull in the onslaught, no time to breathe between kills. It was a tsunami of
nee-dle teeth and razor claws, of grinning, trumpeting death.

Noguchi didn't think. She danced, swirling and feinting, spinning and firing explosive heat through the
wall of bodies. Behind to the left, a shrieking, elongated skull blown into shards. Claws and arms flying in
mul-tiple directions, legs smashed and falling, grinning metal teeth shattering. An alien chest bursting with
a splash of green acid, the blood hitting the murky water, the swamp turning to bubbling steam before the
Hunt-ers had gone a third of the distance.

The fire from the ship continued to clear a path through the worst of it, but there was still no break in the
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running bodies. Like ants or bees, the drones sacri-ficed themselves to protect their queen mother, an
in-dividual's life meaningless to the good of the hive. They came from everywhere at her beckoning,
alerted by

some pheromone or telepathy; not even the Hunters knew.

The scents of slime and musk, of fire and some dark and unnatural thing, ofalien filled the hot, close
space inside Noguchi's mask. She didn't smell it, didn't feel the steaming heat, didn't see anything but the
next tar-get. And the next. And the next, as the small band of Hunters pushed on to the nest, leaving
broken, bleed-ing creatures in their wake.

As the wall of animals began to thin, Noguchi didn't notice; she was too intent on the blast of blue-white
heat coming from the end of her burner, the crash of imploding light that tore into each hard alien body
and left it dying or dead. Topknot had stopped at the mouth of the huge, high, rounded shell made of
sleek and dusky alien secretion, the queen's egg-laying chamber and home. The drones wouldn't risk
damag-ing the eggs; they were still coming, but the reckless-ness of their attack had dropped. However
they communicated with their queen, they knew to be care-ful the closer they came to the nest.

Another bug, down, another screaming, clutching monster rushing at herтАФ

тАФand she was roughly shoved aside.

"Hey! DammitтАФ"

Noguchi stumbled, hard, her concentration blown for the half second it took her to realize what had
hap-pened. She reflexively brought her burner up, pointed it at her assailant, but didn't fire.

FuckingbastardтАФ

The competition for kills on the Hunt was fierce, but there had been no call for what the yautja had done.
Except for a very few, the drones had broken off their attack; it gave her ample time to hate him as he
took out the drone in her stead. Shorty. Of all the nov-ices, he was the one most often singled out as a
target by the others; he was barely a head taller than she, dis-tinctly undersized, and in the weeks that his
group had