"13 Sentinels 01 - The Devils Hand" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

Wolff turned and was gone.

"That little fool," Lisa said after Rick told her about Minmei. They were alone in a small lounge not far from the bridge. "What was she trying to do, get herself killed?"
"You have to see it from her side," Rick argued. "She felt like everyone she cared about was leaving her."
Lisa regarded him suspiciously. "No, I don't have to see things from her side. But I'm sure you were understanding with her, weren't you? Did she cry, on your shoulder, Rick?"
"Well, what was I supposed to do? You know I'd send her back if we could."
"I wonder," Lisa said, folding her arms.
Rick made a conciliatory gesture. "Whoa...Look, I don't like where this one's going. She's here and there's nothing we can do about it, okay?"
Lisa looked at him for a moment, then stepped in to lean her head on his shoulder. They hadn't had a chance to say two words to each other for more than twenty-four hours, and their comfortable bed was beginning to feel miles away. They were both exhausted and still a little stunned by the events that had transpired since they'd gone off to work!
"Is it the honeymoon you hoped for?" Rick asked, holding her.
She let out her breath in a rush. "It's the nightmare I wished we'd never have to live through." She pulled back to gaze at him. "We came here to sue for peace. And now..."
"Maybe that doesn't exist anymore," Rick said, turning to the viewport as Tirol loomed into view.

In the nave of Tiresia's transformed Royal Hall, Obsim listened patiently to the computer's announcement. A flash of synaptic sparks danced across the brain section's fissured surface, strobing orange light down at the scientist and a group of soldiers who were gathered nearby. For the past several periods the starship had been trying to communicate with Tirol, but Obsim had elected to remain silent. If indeed they had come in "peace," why were they equipped with such a mighty arsenal of weapons? More confusing still, their ship and mecha were Protoculturedriven, a fact that linked them beyond a shadow of a doubt to the Masters' empire.
And now they were sending one of their transport dropships to the moon's surface, just as he had guessed they would.
"Tell the Command ships to prepare," Obsim instructed his lieutenant. "And have your units stand by for a strikeship assault."
"And the Inorganics, Obsim?" the lieutenant asked. "Will the brain reactivate them now?"
Obsim came as close to smiling as his physiognomy allowed. "In due time, Enforcer, in due time."


CHAPTER NINE
I suppose I should have been surprised that it didn't happen a lot sooner. Rick never believed that he was cut out to command, and I can remember him already trying to talk himself into resigning his commission when work first began on the SDF-3. I wanted to get to the bottom of it, but he didn't want my help. Basically he didn't want to hear his fears contradicted. So I was left to puzzle it out like a mystery, and I was convinced that both Roy Fokker's death and Rick's continuing "little brother" attitude had a lot to do with his behavior.
Lisa Hayes, Recollections

It was an historic moment: the dropship's arrival on Tirol marked the first occasion humankind had set foot on a world outside the Solar system. But it was business as usual, and that business was war.
The GMU rumbled down out of the dropship's portside ramp onto the moon's barren surface, and within minutes Wolff was shouting "Go! Go! Go!" into the Hovertank cockpit mike as his Pack left the mobile base. Their landing zone was at the foot of a towering black ridge of impossibly steep crags; but soon the Pack was moving across a barren stretch of seemingly irradiated terrain. The massive GMU dwindled behind the twenty-unit squadron as they formed up on Wolff's lead and sped toward Tirol's principal city-Tiresia, according to Breetai. It was late afternoon on Tirol.
The Hovertanks were ground-effect vehicles; reconfigurable assemblages of heavy-gauge armor in angular flattened shapes and acute edges, with rounded downsloping deflection prows. In standard mode, they rode on a cushion of self-generated lift, but mechamorphosed, they were either Battloid or guardian-squat, two-legged waddling mecha the size of a house, with a single, top-mounted particle-projection cannon.
Wolff called up the GMU on the comlink for a situation report, and Vince Grant's handsome brown face surfaced on the mecha's cockpit commo screen. A defensive perimeter had been established around the base, and so far there was no sign of activity, enemy or otherwise. "You've got an open channel home," Vince told him. "We want to know everything you're seeing out there."
Wolff rogered and signed off. There were no maps of Tiresia, but bird's-eye scans from the SDF-3 scopes had furnished the Pack with a fairly complete overview. The city was laid out like a spoked wheel, the hub of which appeared to be an enormous Cheops-like pyramid. Eight streets lined with secondary buildings radiated out from the center at regular intervals, from magnetic north right around the compass. Nothing came close to rivaling the pyramid in size; in fact, most of the structures were the rough equivalent of three stories or less, a mere fraction of the central temple.
Exedore had described Tiresia's architecture as approximating Earth's Greco-Roman styles, with some ultratech innovations that were Tirol's alone. This is precisely what Wolff found as his Pack entered the city; although hardly a learned man, Wolff had seen enough pictures and renderings of Earth's ancient world to corroborate the Zentraedi ambassador's claims.
"Um, fluted columns, entablatures, peaked pediments," he radioed back to the GMU. "Arches, vaults...buildings that look like the Parthenon, or that thing in Rome-the Colosseum. But I'm not talking about marble or anything like that. Everything seems to be faced with some nonporous alloy or ceramic-even the streets and courtyards."
But this was only half the story, the facade, as it were. Because elsewhere were rectilinear and curved structures of modernistic design, often surrounded by curious antennalike towers and assemblages of huge clear conduits.
And much of it had been reduced to smoldering rubble.
"I'm splitting the squadron," Wolff updated a few minutes later. Straight ahead was the central pyramid, still a good distance off but as massive as a small mountain in Tirol's fading light. He switched over to the mecha's tactical net. "A team will follow me up the middle. Winston, Barisky, take your team over to the next avenue and parallel us. But stay on-line with me. One block at a time, and easy does it."
"Roger, Wolff Leader," Winston returned.
"Switching over to IR scanners and moving out."
There was still no sign of the Invid, or anything else for that matter, but Wolff was experiencing an itchy feeling he had come to rely on, a combat sense he had developed during the Malcontent Uprisings, hunting down renegade Zentraedi in the jungled Southlands. He checked his cockpit displays and boosted the intensity of the forward scanners. At the end of the broad street where it met the hub were a pair of stacked free-floating columns with some sort of polished sphere separating them. He was close enough to the pyramid base now to make out a stairway that ascended one face; the pillared shrine at the summit was no longer visible.
Just then Winston's voice cracked over the net, loud in Wolff's ears.
"We've got movement, Wolff Leader! Multiple signals all over the place!"
"What's your position, Boomer?" Winston gave the readings in a rush. "Can you identify signatures? Boomer, do you copy?"
"Nothing we've seen," the B-team leader said over a burst of angry static. "Bigger than either ship those flyboys registered. Much bigger."
"On our way," Wolff was saying when something thirty feet tall suddenly broke through a domed building off to his left. It was an inky black bipedal ship, with cloven feet and arms like armored pincers. The head, equally armored, was helmet-shaped but elongated in the rear, and sandwiched between two nasty-looking shoulder cannons. Wolff watched spellbound as orange priming charges formed at the tips of the cigar-shaped weapons. An instant later two radiant beams converged on one of the Hovertanks and blew it to smithereens.
Wolff gave the order to return fire as four more enemy ships emerged from the buildings and a fifth surfaced in front of him, right out of the damned street!
The Hovertanks reconfigured to Gladiator mode and singled off against the Invid, the streets a battle zone all at once, filled with heavy metal thunder and blinding flashes of explosive light. Wolff saw another of his number go down. On the tac net, Wilson reported that his team was faring no better.
"Go to Battloid mode. Pull back and regroup," he ordered. Then he tried to raise the GMU.

In the GMU's command center, Vince Grant received word of the recon group's situation: four, possibly five, Hovertanks were down and Wolff was calling for reinforcements or extraction. His Pack had been chased to the outskirts of the city, where they were dug in near the remains of what the colonel described as "a kind of Roman basilica."
"Tell him to hold on, help's on the way," Grant told the radio man. Then he swung around to the command center's tactical board. At about the time Wolff's Pack had been ambushed, Invid troops had begun a move against the mobile base itself. Deafening volleys were rolling in from the line, echoing in the sawtooth ridge at the GMU's back. Night had fallen, but it was as if someone had forgotten to inform Tirol's skies.
"Ground forces are sustaining heavy casualties in all perimeter zones," a com tech updated without having to be asked. "The enemy are employing mecha that fit yesterday's profiles, along with teams of one-pilot strike ships."
The commander studied a computer schematic as it turned and upended itself on the screen. Vince tried to make some sense of the thing. A deadly kazoo, he thought, with forward guns like withered arms and an undercarriage cluster of propulsion globes. Whatever they were, they were decimating the forward lines. He had already lost count of the wounded and dead.