"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 19 - Looters of Tharn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

The machine closed to within a hundred yards of where Blade crouched in the grass. He stayed totally
motionless. But he never took his eyes off the machine. It was obvious that whoever had built it was
advanced enough to use antigravity. That meant comparably advanced weapons of some sort. Blade
didn't want to find out the hard way just what they were.
At fifty yards the machine came to a stop, then sank until it was only a few feet above the grass. The four
bulges on the bottom split open and four articulated metal legs unfolded, reaching for the ground.

The broad metal plates at the end of each leg touched the ground. Instantly the shimmering in the air
under the machine faded away. With an audible creaking and clanking the machine settled down. Blade
saw that the metal finish was not as polished and flawless as it had appeared. The underside was stained
and discolored, and the upper hull and turret showed pitting and scarring. This was an old machine. As
old as the city and built by the same people? Possibly. But the machine's age didn't necessarily mean that
its weapons would be useless.

Slowly the machine's turret began to turn. The two projecting bulges on either side of the turret also split
open. From one rose a blinking yellow white light. From the other rose a round metal disc. Both wobbled
upward on jointed metal arms until they, were some twenty feet up.

Blade noticed that two more identical machines had slipped out of the city while he watched the first
one. But these were not moving toward him. Instead they were drifting away to either side, riding their
shimmering antigravity fields fifty feet above the ground. After a few minutes they came to a stop and
landed. They formed a triangle with the nearest machine, a triangle more than a mile on each side.

The patrol has deployed to survey their area of operations, thought Blade. Now-what's the next step in
their standard operational procedure?

Gradually Blade became aware of something distinctly unpleasant filling the air around him. It was not an
odor, not a sound. It was a something that his senses couldn't register, that his mind couldn't define
precisely. But something that was gnawing away at the heart of his self-confidence, filling him with a
swelling, nameless fear and dread. The machine began to seem like a fanged monster gathering itself to
leap on him like a man-eating tiger. Blade felt a cold sweat breaking out on his skin and heard his teeth
begin to chatter. He realized that his hands were shaking so hard that he couldn't have drawn his sword
to save his life. He knew that in another moment he was going to lose control of his bowels and stomach.
He would be lying there, helpless in his own filth, when the machine came marching over to him, to crush
him under those massive metal feet, or-

Then, somewhere in Blade's mind behind the mounting fear, a light dawned. A faint light that flickered at
first, like a candle in a rising wind, then swelled and grew until he realized what was paralyzing him with
fear.

Subsonics.

A modulated sonic pulse at a frequency below the range the human ear can pick up produces fear
reactions. The more intense the subsonic pulses, the more intense the fear reaction.

Blade heaved a sigh of relief. Now that he knew what he faced, he could use all of his training, all of his
self-control, to fight his instincts. Part of the fear had been the deadliest, most uncontrollable sort of
fear-fear of the unknown. Now that was gone. He could think and fight again.

Blade did not relax, however. He was quite sure that the machine had nowhere near exhausted its bag of