"David Gerrold - Chtorr 4 - A Season For Slaughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

that is strong enough to attract every carrion eater from here to Waco. Pass the
word. Keep an eye out." My eyes were already starting to water, but I didn't dare lift
my contamination hood to wipe them.
We were in the leading rollagon. Behind us followed a convoy of four more. We
bounced across the denuded hills like a deranged herd of dinosaurs. The
deforestation here hadn't been recent, but it had been thorough. Nothing was going
to grow here again for a long, long time. Obviously, no Chtorran agency had been
responsible for this. What a stupid war this was turning out to be-we were supposed
to be defending the Terran ecology; instead we were burning it away, destroying it to
save it.
According to the original plan, Terran plants should have been reasserting
themselves by now. There should have been sprouts of green everywhere.
Instead-we had a barren moonscape; a rumpled ash-colored terrain of uncomfortable
hills and broken rock, all punctuated by blackened spikes, the remnants of a dead
forest. A faint pink haze lay across the land; it gathered itself in dark brown pools
and lurked in the deep gullies between the hills; and I wondered if this was the source
of the smell. The pervasive undercast hid the horizon behind a bleary gray veil;
distance just faded away into nothingness. Was this pale dry fog something Chtorran
or another one of the delights engineered in the Oakland labs? It couldn't be the
product of a living thing, could it? Nothing could live in this stench.
There was life here, of a sort; desperate, hungry, futile-and mostly Chtorran, of
course. There were black ropy vines stretched across the ground, pulling at it like
anchoring cables; and there were things growing on the vines, occasional bright
patches of pink or blue or white, not quite flowers, but not quite anything else either.
There were patches of dark ultraviolet fungus and occasional curtains of red gauze
hanging from dead tree limbs. Deep in the shadowed gullies we could see thick
rubbery scars of wormberry, and the occasional clump of leafy black basil. As we
rolled on, we started seeing purple coleus, midnight ivy, and the first bright patches
of scarlet kudzu.
The kudzu was turning out to be especially nasty. All it did was grow, but that
was enough. It looked like blood-colored ivy, and it grew even faster than its Terran
counterpart. It could blanket a house in weeks, a forest in months. You could cut it
back easily enough, but you could never quite eradicate it completely. It just kept
coming back. It had the tenacity of a bill collector-only quieter. In Georgia a small
army of civilians had burned back several hundred acres of it that was starting to get
too close to the edge of Atlanta and found the bones of cattle; dogs, cats, and more
than a few missing people. No one was quite sure of the killing mechanism yetтАФor
even if there was one. Maybe its danger was in its thickness; it was the perfect
ground cover for small Chtorran predators. Like all things Chtorran, the best advice
was still avoid it if you can.
Unless, of course, your job was to seek it out. Then you didn't have the luxury of
that option.
This particular expedition was here at the specific request of the provisional
governor of the Territory of North Mexico. We were one of three doing on-site
mapping of the northeastern wilderness, to determine the success of last year's
defoliation. I already knew the answer. I could have told them the answer before
we'd left, before we'd even planned this operation. But-there are people who don't
believe anything until they've sent somebody else to see-and even then, if it disagrees
with what they want to hear, they still won't believe it.
 The Brazilian mission had been sent back for reconsideration or put on hold or