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

"Welcome, Cabell," Exedore said evenly. "No, your eyes have not deceived you, as Dr. Lang's have."
"But, Exedore, how is this possible?" Cabell glanced from face to face, searching for other surprises, then returned to Exedore's. The first of the Masters' biogenetically engineered clones! The one whose very history Cabell had been forced to reshape and re-create after the Masters had turned their giant miners to warriors...
Little by little the story unfolded: how the SDF-1-identified by Cabell as Zor's ship-had crash-landed on Earth, and how some ten years later the Zentraedi had followed. And how a war for the repossession of that ship had commenced.
Cabell was on the edge of his seat, attentive to each added fact, and silent except when he interrupted to provide a date or refine a point.
"And the armada was actually defeated?" he said, as if in shock. "Almost five million ships..." Suddenly a maniacal expression surfaced. "Then, you have the matrix! You do have it, don't you!"
"It didn't exist," Lang answered him. "We searched-"
"No, no, no, no," Cabell ranted, shaking his head, white beard like a banner. "It does exist! You searched the fold generators, of course."
Rick, Lisa, Lang, and Exedore exchanged looks.
"Well, no," Lang said, almost apologetically. "We didn't want to tamper with the fold mechanism."
Cabell slammed his hand on the table. "It's there! It's hidden in the fold generators!"
Lang was shaking his head.
"What happened?" Cabell said, disheartened.
Exedore answered him. "The ship was destroyed by Khyron, Cabell. Its remains are buried on Earth."
Cabell grew strangely silent. He put a hand to his forehead, as though stricken. Rick recognized what he took to be a look of concern and abject terror.
"But...don't you see," he began. "No mere collision could destroy that device. It exists-the one source of Protoculture in the Quadrant-and the Masters have left Tirol to find it!"
"Left for where?" Rick demanded.
"Earth, Commander," Rem answered him.
"Oh my God," Lisa said.
Edwards and Rick looked at each other. The same names were on both men's minds, but for different reasons-Zand, Moran, Leonard. The field marshal's prelaunch warnings about Earth's vulnerability assumed a sickening immediacy. Rick suppressed a panicked scream that had seemed to lodge itself somewhere beneath his diaphragm.
"But you can overtake them," Cabell was saying. "The Masters' fortresses have superluminal drives, but there wasn't sufficient Protoculture reserves to permit a fold. They have been gone for ten years in your reckoning. You could meet them and arrange an exchange for the device. Surely they do not want war with your world-not when there are so many worlds available to them." Cabell let his words trail off when he realized that no one was listening to him. It was at this moment that he decided to say nothing of the Elders who had left Tirolspace only a short while ago. Let them be marooned in that cruel void, he said to himself.
Brigadier General Reinhardt grunted sardonically. "This mission was undertaken to avoid just such a war. We came to tell the Masters that Earth didn't have what they were looking for."
"Unfortunately, we knew nothing of the situation here," Lang added. "The Invid's attack against us damaged our fold mechanism. We reasoned that by allying ourselves with Tirol..."
"You would have what you needed to return to your world."
"Precisely."
Cabell stared at his hands and said nothing.
"What about the message you sent our troops?" Rick cut in, anxious to return the interrogation to its central issue. "What's the situation down there?"
Briefly, Cabell explained the circumstances of the Invid's recent conquest of Tirol. He described and named the battle mecha the RDF had found itself up against: the Shock Troopers, Pincer Ships, Command ships, and the Inorganic drones-the Scrim, Crann, Odeon, and Hellcats.
"Their troops are known as Enforcers," he told the committee. "Essentially they have no independent will, save for certain evolved ones, who are thought of as `scientists.' But the brain controls all of them."
"Brain?" said Edwards. "What is this idiocy?"
Cabell stroked his beard. "It is a computer of sorts-but much different than anything either of our races would fashion. We believe it is linked to a larger unit the Invid keep on Optera. But if you can get to the one they've placed in the Royal Hall, you will defeat them here."
"They've deployed some kind of force field," Rick said as all eyes turned to him. "So far we haven't been able to penetrate it."
"What about a surgical strike, Admiral?" Niles Obstat suggested.
Cabell stood up. "Please, Earthers, I know I have no right to ask, but our people are being held prisoner..."
Rick made a calming gesture to reassure the old man. "We're not going to do anything rash. But we do need a way in, Cabell."
"You can go in the way we came out," Rem said suddenly. "Cabell will map it out for you."
Cabell flashed his assistant an angry look. He had hoped to keep Zor's laboratory secret a while longer, but he supposed there was no hope of that now. "Of course I will," he told Rick.
Edwards was already in touch with GMU control. "Grant apparently had the same idea," Edwards reported. "He's sent the Wolff Pack in."
"The computer is invaluable," Cabell urged. "You must inform your troops that there are ways to deactivate the brain without destroying it. It could be of great use to all of us."
Edwards felt his faceplate and stared at Cabell obliquely.
It is invaluable, it controls all of them...It could be of great use to us. The words rolled around in his mind, settling down to a dark inner purpose.
"I want command and control," he said into the cam while everyone's attention was diverted. "Get the Ghost Squadron ready for departure. I'll be down to lead them in personally."

Exedore and Lang met separately with Cabell and Rem after the committee session was dissolved. While the military faction was off deciding how best to deal with Cabell's revelations concerning the Invid brain, Lang, fully aware of the regulations he was violating, took the two Tiresians to the SDF-3's engineering section and eventually into the hold that housed the spacefold generators. On the way Cabell talked about the history of Tirol and the sociopolitical upheavals that had paved the way for the Great Transition and the emergence of Robotech Masters.
Lang and Exedore were as rapt as Cabell had been only an hour before. At last someone knowledgeable was filling in all the gaps of the saga they had tried to patch together from records found aboard the SDF-1 and the Zentraedi flagship. And how false those records were now proved to be! Even the misinformed. scenarios Lang himself had worked out, the timelines he had spent countless hours assembling, the motives and explanations he had assigned.
Cabell spoke of Zor as one would of a demiurge, and in many ways Tirol's story was Zor's own-from his noble birth as a senator's only son, to his untimely death at the hands of the Regent's newly-evolved troops. Cabell told them of Zor's remarkable discovery on Optera, and of the subsequent development of Protoculture and Robotechnology; of the creation of the Zentraedi, and the growth of a new political elite; of the war that raged throughout the empire, and a renegade's attempts at rebalancing the scales...
Lang was given to understand that Zor, Cabell's one time student, hadn't so much kept the secrets of Protoculture from the Masters as scattered them across the galaxy. There were still Flowers, on Optera and on many of the worlds Zor had seeded just prior to his death, but the Invid found them sterile and unusable because their Pollinators had also been taken. And while the Masters were in possession of these curious creatures, they no longer had the matrix that allowed for Protoculture conjuration from the Flowers. Zor had seen to it that no one could profit from his discoveries; and in the end he had driven himself half mad, convinced that he could somehow rule over all of it and parcel out to the universe the gift of everlasting life.
Exedore and Lang learned a little about Cabell, also; about how he and Zor and several other Tirolian scientists had deliberately refused to embark on the dangerous course the Masters had followed-the road to heightened powers and the toll that journey extracted. Ever since the Masters left, Cabell and his young assistant, Rem, had been trying to replicate Zor's achievements. But Cabell was now beginning to believe that the process was more one of mind than of matter, and that Protoculture would never be scientifically conjured from the Flowers-it had to be willed from them.
As Lang listened to Cabell's assessment of the Masters, he found himself growing weary and almost bemused by the Expeditionary mission's ironic accomplishment: in leaving Earth behind, they had left the door wide open for the Masters' arrival. It occurred to him that peace would never have been possible with such a race, and he could only shudder at the thought of Earth in the incapable hands of Leonard and the Army of the Southern Cross.
Once in the fold-generator hold, the language of pure science replaced the grunts and glottal stops of the Tiresian tongue. The computer was their interpreter now, and as Cabell inspected the generators, he and Lang began to communicate with mathematics and schematic appraisals. Lang was amazed at how quickly the Tiresian was able to adapt and reshape his thinking to fit the demands of Human artificial-intelligence systems.
"But you have the necessary Protoculture reserves for a fold," Cabell said after a long while. "Enough for a flotilla of ships, in fact. All that's lacking is sufficient fuel for the Reflex drives." He saw Lang's bewildered look, and quickly created a program that could illustrate his ideas. Once or twice he called on Exedore to define a word or phrase.