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

one.

A minute passed, a second, then a third. Blade's teeth were locked tight together with the strain of
waiting. When were they going to shoot, if they were? Or maybe they weren't? Maybe he had succeeded
in overloading whatever tracking computer the other machines might have? Maybe-?

The howl of an incoming rocket sounded from above. This time the burst came off to the right, less than
a hundred yards away. Masses of earth and grass flew into the air on top of a vast cloud of gray brown
smoke. This time the blast wave in the air snatched at Blade's machine like a terrier grabbing a rat in its
jaws.
 The machine lurched wildly, tilting far over to the left. If Blade hadn't been strapped in, he would have
sailed out of the chair and smashed into the wall hard enough to break every bone in his body. He
clutched the control wheel, his knuckles standing out white. Now he knew what weapons the big
machines carried. Now it was time to-

Another rocket hit, this time a hundred yards almost directly behind him. The blast practically stood
Blade's machine on its nose. By sheer reflex he pulled the control wheel backward. The machine
straightened out of its dive just above the grass.

Blade threw a quick glance behind him. For the moment the machines firing at him were invisible behind
the smoke from the second burst. Was he invisible to them?

Probably not. Very likely they carried radar or something like it to track him. But neither radar nor the
human eye could see over the horizon. If he stayed low as he ran- Before he had completed the thought,
his hand was shoving the speed control all the way forward in one smooth motion.

A giant rubbery fist shoved him back hard into the control chair. On the screens the plain suddenly
turned flat, featureless, seemingly as bare as a tabletop. The smoke cloud from the second burst shrank
as if by magic. The towers of the abandoned city dwindled to toys, sank down toward the horizon, and
vanished. In the dim distance behind him, Blade saw a third rocket burst in a third tree of smoke. But he
neither heard nor felt anything. Then the last smoke vanished and he was alone in the machine as it raced
away over the plain.

How fast was he moving? There was no speed indicator he could read. But from the blur below him, he
knew he must be going not much less than four hundred miles an hour.

Four hundred miles an hour, in a machine with the strength and some of the weapons of a tank. The
builders of this machine had built something worth studying, no matter how badly they seemed to have
maintained it.

And after he had studied the machine, perhaps he should try studying its makers? Blade grinned. That
might be a good idea, if he could ever find them. For all he had seen, he might be the only human being
alive in this dimension. But it was going to be interesting nonetheless.

Chapter 8

Blade kept the machine low and fast for a while, partly to be sure he was completely out of range, partly
to test the machine's power. By the time he slowed down, even the miles-high cloud of smoke rising
above the city had long since dropped below the horizon.