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

Disgusted, Cabell stood up and reached across the console to shut down the audio transmissions. "The Flower of Life, that's what they've come for," he told his apprentice in a tired voice.
"But that plant hasn't been present in this sector for generations," Rem said, slipping into the padded con chair.
"Then they'll want the matrix. Or failing that, vengeance for what the Masters ordered done to their world."
Rem turned his attention to the screen. Scrim devils and Hellcats were tearing through the Bioroid base, eyes aglow like hot coals, fangs slick with the clone pilots' blood. "They'll rip the planet apart looking for something they'll never find."
"No one ever accused the Invid of being logical, my boy, only thorough."
"Then the city will fall next. Those drones are unstoppable."
"Nonsense," Cabell exclaimed, anger in his voice. "They may be intimidating, but they're not unstoppable."
Rem shot to his feet. "Then let's find their weak spot, Cabell." He drew a handgun from beneath his cape and armed it. "And for that, we're going to require a specimen."


CHAPTER THREE
Try as he might to offset the suffering his discoveries had unleashed, Zor's mistakes kept piling up, compounding themselves. He'd sent his ship to Earth only to have the Zentraedi follow it there; he'd hidden the matrix so well that the Masters had ample time to wage their war; his seeded worlds had drawn the Invid...What remained but the final injustice?-that by trying to replicate his very form and drives, the Regent and Regis should become prisoners of appetites they had never before experienced. Is it any mystery why even the Masters banished his image throughout their empire?
Bloom Nesterfig, The Social Organization of the Invid

Brigadier General Reinhardt, having shuttled up to the factory earlier that day, was on hand to meet the mission command team. He informed Lang, Lord Exedore, Lisa, and Rick that things were still running on schedule; the last shiploads of supplies and stores were on their way up from Earth even now, and most of the 10,000 who would make up the crew were already aboard the satellite, many aboard the SDF-3 itself. Max and Miriya joined the others by an enormous hexagonal viewport that overlooked the null-gee central construction hold. They were joined after a moment by Colonel Wolff and Jean Grant, who had Bowie and Dana by the hand.
The view from here was fore to aft along the underside of the fortress. Lisa often wished that the bow wasn't quite so, well, phallic-the euphemism she employed in mixed company. But the twin booms of the main gun were just that: like two horned, tumescent appendages that took up nearly a third of the crimson ship's length. If the weapon had none of the awesome firepower of the SDF-1's main gun, at least it had the look of power to it. Autowelders and supply shuttles were moving through the hold's captured sunlight, and a crew of full-size Zentraedi were at work on one of the sky-blue sensor blisters along the fortress's port side.
"How many kilometers out will we have to be before we can fold?" Wolff wanted to know. Everyone remembered all too plainly what had happened when the SDF-1 attempted to fold while still in the vicinity of Macross Island.
"Lunar orbit will suffice," Exedore told him. "Doctor Lang and Breetai concur on this."
"Speak of the devil," Lisa said, looking around the hold, "I thought he was supposed to meet us here."
Miriya laughed shortly. "He probably forgot."
"He's been pretty busy," Rick offered.
"Well, we can't wait," Reinhardt said, running a hand over his smooth pate. "We've got a lot of last-minute details to attend to and-"
Everyone reacted to Dana's gasp at the same moment, turning first to the child's startled face, then to the hatchway she had her eyes fixed on.
There was a giant standing here.
Half the gathered group knew him as a sixty-footer, of course, but even micronized Breetai was an impressive sight: almost eight feet of power dressed in a uniform more befitting a comic book hero than a Zentraedi commander, and wearing a masklike helmet that left only his mouth and lantern jaw exposed.
Before anyone could speak, he had moved in and onehand heaved Lisa and Miriya atop each of his shoulders. His voice boomed. "So I'm not important enough to wait for, huh? You Micronians are an impatient lot."
He let the women protest a moment before setting them back down on the floor.
"I never thought I'd see you like this again," Lisa said, tugging her uniform back into shape. The only other time Breetai had permitted himself to undergo the reduction process was during the search of the SDF-1 for the Protoculture matrix.
"It takes a man to give away a bride," Breetai said in all seriousness, "not a giant."

Dawn marked Tiresia's doom. The troop carriers returned, yawning catastrophe; but this time it wasn't Inorganics they set loose, but the crablike Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships. They attacked without mercy, skimming discs of white annihilation into the streets, dwellings, and abandoned temples. The humanoid populace huddled together in shelters, while those masterless clones who had become the city's walking dead surrendered and burned. Left to fend for themselves, the old and infirm tried to hide from the invaders, but it was hardly a day to play games with the Reaper: his minions were everywhere, and within hours the city was laid to waste.
Cannon muzzles and missile racks sprang from hidden emplacements, spewing return fire into the void, and once again the Bioroids faced the storm and met their end in heroic bursts of orange flame and blinding light. From the depths of the pyramidal Royal Hall rode an elite unit on saucer-shaped Hovercraft outfitted with powerful disc guns and particle-beam weapons systems. They joined the Invid in an airborne dance of devastation, coupling obscenely in the city skies, exchanging thundering volleys of quantum deaths.
Morning was filled with the corkscrewing trails of angry projectiles and crisscrossed with hyphens and pulses of colored light. Spherical explosions strobed overhead, rivaling the brightness of Fantoma's own primary, low in the east behind clouds of debris. Mecha fell like a storm of blazing hail, cutting fiery swaths across the cityscape.
Here a Pincer Ship put down to give chase to an old man its discs had thrown clear from a Hoverchair. Frustrated, the Invid trained its weapons on Tiresia's architectural wonders and commenced a deadly pirouette. Statues and ornaments slagged in the heat, and five of the antigrav columns that marked the Royal Hall's sacred perimeter were toppled.
Ultimately the Invid's blue command ships moved in, forming an unbreachable line as they marched through the city, their top-mounted cannons ablaze. Inside the shelters the citizens of Tiresia cowered and clung to one another as the footfalls of the giants' war strides shook Tirol's ravaged surface, echoing in the superheated subterranean confinement.

Cabell and Rem had chosen a deserted, now devastated sector for their Hellcat hunt. With most of Tiresia's defenses in ruin, the fierce fighting that typified the early hours of the invasion had subsided to distant hollow blasts from the few remaining contested areas. A patrol of bipedal Inorganics moved past the alley where the scientist and his assistant waited. Rem raised the muzzle of the assault rifle he had slung over one shoulder, but Cabell waved him back.
"But it doesn't sense our presence," Rem insisted, peering over Cabell's shoulder. "Now's our chance."
"No," Cabell said firmly. "I want one of the feline droids."
They began to move into the street after the Inorganic had passed. Cabell kept them to the shadows at first, then grew more brazen. Rem understood that the old man was trying to lure one of the creatures out but he had some misgivings about Cabell's method.
"I tope we snare one of them and not the other way around," he said wearily, swinging the rifle in a gentle arc.
Cabell stopped short in the center of the street as a kind of mechanical growl reached them from somewhere nearby. "I have the distinct impression our progress is being observed."
"I was about to say the same thing."
"Perhaps our behavior is puzzling to them," Cabell mused, back in motion now. "They probably expect us to run in terror."
"And I forget, why aren't we?" Rem started to say when another growl sounded. "Guess they're not puzzled anymore...Show yourself, fiend," he growled back, arming the rifle.
"There!" Cabell said all at once.
The Hellcat was glaring down at them from a low roof not twenty yards up the street, midday light caught in the beast's shoulder horns, fangs, and razor-sharp tail. Then it pounced.
"On stun!" Cabell cried, and Rem fired.
The short burst glanced off the cat's torso, confusing it momentarily, but not long enough to make a difference. It leaped straight for the two men before Rem could loose a second shot, but he did manage to shove Cabell clear of the Inorganic's path. The cat turned sharply as it landed; Rem hit it twice more to no avail.
"Get away from it, boy!" Rem heard Cabell shout. He looked around, amazed that the old man had covered so much ground in so little time-although the Inorganic was certainly incentive enough: it was hot on Cabell's trail.