"McCay, Bill - Stargate Retaliation" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCay Bill)

an inconspicuous set of studs set into the crystalline wall. Fingers stabbed in
the right combination, and the seemingly solid quartz surface reconstituted
itself, forming an opening-an access hatch for maintenance technicians.
The leader vanished inside, followed by Neb. Khonsu waited until the first of
the fellahin reached him. Seizing the luckless Abydan, he dragged him inнside
the service conduit. He'd broken the weakling's neck before the biomorphic
quartz redeployed to its wall form. Stripping off the dead man's homespun cloak,
Khonsu clambered up the stanchions to the next deck. He could hear the thudding
of furious fists on the panel below.
No one saw them emerge through a hatch on the level above. Khonsu shrank his
falcon mask back to its necklace configuration, slipped on the captured robe,
and adjusted its hood to shade his features. He took the lead as the intruders
headed for the nearest stairway.
A pair of guards were clattering upward as he arнrived at the landing.
"Hawk-heads!" one cried in his Abydan peasant acнcent, thinking he spoke to a
comrade. "They've broken into the ship. Keep an eye-"
That was as far as he got before Khonsu was upon them. He dropped his
blast-lance. This was close work, best done by hand. Khonsu had no illusions as
to why he'd been taken on this mission. He was Khonsu the killer, trained in the
arts of silent death.
One fellah was down, his throat crushed. The other dodged Khonsu's blow, turning
to flee. Khonsu caught him by the scruff of his cloak and hauled him back. The
man was in midair as the killer seized him by the leg. The figure twisted
convulsively as Khonsu brought him down across his left knee. The spine cracked,
and Khonsu broke the neck for good measure as the body dropped. Quickly he
stripped the dead Abydans and passed their robes to his companions.
Then came a stiff climb toward the zenith of the pyramid ship-to Launch Deck
Four. Once this had been a hangar for part of the udajeet contingent carried by
the battlecraft. But one of the antigravity gliders, crippled in the fighting
with the Earthlings and their Abydan allies, had crashed into the open docking
space, creating chaos inside-and jamming the deck's huge hangar doors in the
open position.
While Neb and Khonsu kept watch, their leader proнduced a metal spool wound with
an almost filament-thin thread. The Horus guard found a flame-blackened but
still sound conduit near the open doors. The first few inches of thread unwound
from the spool turned out to be a preformed loop. A gentle shake teased the loop
open. Then the spool went through the loop to create a simple hitch around the
heavy pipe. Khonsu and Neb each did the same, finding a suitable belay. They
backed toward the open bay doors, paying out the monofilament cable until they
stood right on the brink.
The invaders clapped handle-like devices to their spools of cable, then leapt
backward. Khonsu felt his spool unreeling with an angry whir. His feet hit the
sloping golden surface of the pyramid ship, and he tightened the brakes on his
hand grip. The filament quivered under his weight but held. Khonsu knew better
than to touch the thread that bore his weight. Under this tension the thin line
would probably slice through fingers and bone like a razor.
He caught a glimpse in his peripheral vision of Neb kicking aloft. Releasing the
spool's brakes, Khonsu leapt off, too. Again-and again.
In a quick series of huge rappelling bounds, infiltraнtion team reached the base
of the stranded spacecraft seconds before warriors came boiling out of the