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

The clam shaped Invid troop carriers remanifested in Fantoma's brightside space, using the giant's rings for ECM cover and yawning more than a thousand Pincer Ships into the void, while the Earthforces' superdimensional fortress raised its energy shields and swung itself from stationary orbit. As the fortress's secondary batteries traversed and ranged in, teams of Alpha and first-generation Veritech fighters streamed from the launch bays. Inside the mile-long ship, men and women answered the call of klaxons and alert sirens, racing to battle stations and readying themselves in dozens of command posts and gun, turrets. Scanners linked to the Tactical Information Center's big boards swept and probed; computers tied in to those same systems assessed, analyzed, executed, and distributed a steady flow of data; techs and processors bent to their assigned tasks, requesting updates and entering commands, hands and fingers a blur as they flew across keyboards, decks, and consoles.
On the enemy's side, things were much less complicated: pilots listened and obeyed, hurling themselves against the Humans' war machine with a passionless intensity, a blind obedience, a violent frenzy...
"Are you sure you want to go through with this?" Max Sterling asked Rick over the tac net. Rick's image was on the VT's right commo screen. Miriya was on the left one. There was still time to turn back.
"Positive, Skull Leader," Rick responded. "And I don't want either of you babysitting me."
"Now, why would we want to do that?" Miriya said.
Rick made a face. "Well, that's what everybody else is trying to do."
Max made light of his friend's plight, but at the same time was fully aware of the concern he felt. He had no worries about Rick's combat skills-he had kept his hand in all these years. But Rick seemed to have forgotten that out here stray thoughts were as dangerous as annihilation discs. Nothing extraneous in mind or body, Max was tempted to remind him. Any pilot, no matter how good he or she might be, had to keep those words in mind; it was as much a warning as it was a code. Mechamorphosis was a serious matter even under optimum conditions; but in space combat it meant the difference between life and death.
Max took a long look at the cockpit displays; the Invid crab-ships were just coming into range. The field was so packed the enemy registered as a white blur on his radar screen. Signatures and targeting information came up on one of the peripherals.
"Block party of bandits," Max said evenly, "nine o'clock clear around to three. ETAs on closure are coming in..."
"Roger, Skull Leader," Rick radioed back. "Talk about your target-rich environment. They're going to be all over us."
Max could hear a certain excitement, an enthusiasm, in Rick's tone.
"We've got a job to do," he advised. "Let's just take them as they come. Nothing fancy. Go for target lock."
Rick acknowledged. "Ready to engage."
Max tightened his hand on the HOTAS. He had visuals on the lead ships now, pincers gleaming in starlight.
An instant later the cold blackness of space was holed by a thousand lights. Death dropped its starting flag and the slaughter recommenced.

Jonathan Wolff had yet to see a finish line for the hellish race his team was running in Tiresia's cruel underground. Four had died instantly in the corridor's collapse, and two more had been pinned under the superheated debris; the rest of the team was huddled on top of each other at the junction, throwing everything they had around the corner. But there was something to be thankful for: the cave-in had only partially sealed off their escape route. Moreover, while the drones were continuing their slow advance, whatever had hit them from behind was goner.
"I'm not picking up any movement, sir," the pointman was shouting above the clamor of the weapons.
Wolff wiped bits of cooled metal from his bodysuit and regarded the mass that had almost buried him. It was the same smooth, ceramiclike material that made up Tiresia's surface streets and many of the city's buildings. Some ferrocrete analogue, he guessed.
A corpsman was seeing to the wounded.
Wolff motioned to Quist and asked in hand signals if they still had contact with the tanks.
The radioman nodded.
"Advise them of our situation and tell them we need support," Wolff said into Quist's ear. "I want to see a fire team down here in ten minutes. And I don't care if they have to blast their way in with the tanks."
Quist crouched down along the wall and began to repeat it word for word. Wolff moved to the medic's side. The wounded soldier was a young woman on temporary duty from one of Grant's units. She couldn't have been older than eighteen, and she was torn up pretty badly. Powers, Wolff recalled.
He reached down to brush a strand of damp hair from her face; she returned a weak but stoic smile. Wolff gritted his teeth and stood up, infuriated. He spoke Minmei's name in a whisper and hurried to the junction, his handgun drawn.
Deeper in the maze, Edwards had had his first glimpse of the enemy; but he hadn't stopped to puzzle out or catalog just what it was he had killed. His team was simply firing its way through corridor after corridor, stepping over the bodies and smoking shells their weapons leveled. Hellcats, Scrim, Crann-it made no difference to Edwards; he was closing on the access stairway to the nave of the Royal Hall, and that was all that mattered.
Colonel Adam's splinter group had rejoined the main team after throwing some red-hot rear fire Wolff's way. If they hadn't been entirely successful in burying the Pack alive, Adam's team had at least seen to it that Wolff was no longer in the running for the grand prize, the Invid brain.
Edwards, at point with a gun in each hand, was the first to see the jagged trench Obsim's enforcers had opened in the floor of the Hall. He had no notion of its purpose, but he guessed that the narrow band of overhead light was coming from a room close to the nave, perhaps even adjacent to it. He waved the team to a halt and spent a moment contemplating his options. Surely the brain was aware of their presence, unless the Ghost's bombing runs had given it too much else to think about. Even so, Edwards decided, the enemy was down to the dregs of its force. The things he killed in the corridors were easy prey, and if the Tiresian's word could be trusted, that was all the more reason to assume the brain was preoccupied.
He asked himself whether the brain would expect him to come up through the breach. It would be a difficult and hazardous ascent. But then, why would they have trenched the Hall's floor if they knew about the stairway? He forced any decision from his mind and fell back, allowing his instincts free reign.
And something told him to push on.
Five minutes later the team was creeping up the steep stairway Cabell had described, and Edwards's hand had found the panel stud that would trigger the door. He gave the team the go sign and slammed the switch with the heel of his fist. They poured up and out of the tunnels wailing like banshees, rolling and tearing across the nave's hard floor, lobbing concussion grenades and loosing bursts of death.
Two rows of Invid soldiers who were waiting for them to come through the nave's front entrance were caught by surprise and chopped down in seconds. But two Shock Troopers stepped out of nowhere and began dumping annihilation discs into the hole, frying a quarter of the team before the rest could bring the ships down with a barrage of scanner shots. One of the ships cracked open like an egg, spilling a thick green wash across the floor; the other came apart in an explosion that decapitated the lieutenant.
The nave was filled with fire, smoke, and pandemonium now, but Edwards moved through it like a cat, closing on the brain's towering bubble chamber while the team mopped up. Two seven-foot-tall sentries came at him, spewing bolts of orange flame from their forearm cannons, but he managed to throw himself clear. At the same time he heard the simultaneous discharge of two rocket launchers, and covered himself as the projectiles found their mark.
Edwards was on his feet and back on track before the explosions subsided. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of an unarmed robed figure making a mad dash for the brain. The alien started babbling away and waving its arms in a panicked fashion, as if to plead with Edwards to cease fire. Edwards held up his hand and the nave grew eerily silent, save for Obsim's rantings and the crackle of fires.
"What's it saying?" Major Benson asked.
Edwards told them all to keep quiet. "Go ahead, alien, make your pitch."
A rush of sounds left Obsim's mouth, but it was the brain that spoke. In English.
"Invaders, listen to me: you must not destroy the brain. The brain lives and is a power unto itself. Your purpose and desires are understood, and the brain can see to your needs."
Again Edwards had to tell everyone to cut the chatter. The tall Invid continued to mouth sounds from its snaillike head, which was bobbing up and down at the end of a long, thick neck.
"Behold," the brain translated, as the communicator sphere began to glow. "Your people are at this very moment battling our troops near the rings of Tirol's motherworld."
The communicator showed them a scene of fierce fighting, Pincer Ships and Veritechs locked in mortal combat.
Obsim made a high-pitched sound and swung around to face Edwards, hands tucked in his sleeves. "The brain can put an end to it."
Edwards stared at the alien, then leveled his weapons at the bubble chamber. "Showtime."

From the command chair's elevated position on the SDF-3 bridge, Lisa had a clear view of the battle's distant light show, countless strobelike explosions erupting across an expanse of local space like so many short-lived novas. The Veritech teams were successful at keeping most of the Invid ships away from the fortress, and those few that had broken through were taken out with the in-close weapons systems. But the silent flares, the laser-array bolts, and annihilation discs detailed only half the story; for the rest one would have to turn to the tac net and its cacophony of commands and requests, its warnings and imprecations and prayers, its cries and deathscreams.
Lisa had promised to keep it all at arm's length, to maintain a strategic distance, much as she was doing with the fortress. Resolute, she voiced her commands in a clipped, almost severe tone, and when she watched those lights, it was with a deliberate effort to force their meaning from her thoughts.
An update from one of the duty stations brought her swiveling around now to face the threat board: the two motherships had changed course. Lisa called for position and range.
"Approach vectors on-screen, sir," said an enlisted rating tech. "They're coming straight at us."
"The Skull team requests permission to engage."