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

Rem chased the two of them, firing wildly, and rounded a corner in time to see his mentor barrel-ass down a rubble slide and throw himself into the cockpit of an overturned Bioroid transport ship. Fixed on its prey, the Hellcat seemed unaware of Rem, and was busy trying to claw through the ship's bubble shield. Rem reached down to up the rifle's charge, only to find the thing depleted. He was busy cursing himself when he spied a fallen Invid command ship nearby, one of its cannontips still aglow with priming charge.
Cautiously, he approached the ship, the useless weapon raised. The command plastron was partially ajar, a fourfingered hand lodged in the opening. Rem clambered up and over one of the mecha's arms and gave the hatch a violent tug, forcing the rifle down into the invader's face as he did so. But the Invid was already dead, its bulbous head and stalklike neck split wide open. Rem ignored the stench and took a quick look at the cockpit's bewildering gadgetry. The alien's right hand was hooked around what Rem decided was the trigger mechanism, and from the looks of things the Hellcat was almost perfectly centered in the cannon's reticle. Rem grunted a kind of desperate curse, slid down into the cockpit-his legs going knee-deep into a viscous green bath of nutrient fluid-and hit the trigger.
A pulsed beam of crimson light threw the Hellcat clear from the transport and left it on its side thirty feet from the transport, stunned and enveloped by a kind of St. Elmo's fire. Cabell threw open the canopy and glanced back at the crippled command ship with a bewildered expression.
"Why did you save me?" the old man yelled in Zentraedi, lingua franca of the Masters' empire.
Rem heard the call and was tempted to stay put for a moment, but thought better of it. He showed himself and said, "Hello, Cabell. All safe and sound? You didn't really think I'd abandon you, did you?"
The scientist scowled. "You could have killed me, you young-" He bit off his own words and laughed, resignedly. "My boy, you amaze me."
Rem jumped to the ground and approached the transport. "Frankly, I amaze myself." He looked away from the alien ship he had fired, and gestured to the Hellcat. "Now all we've got to do is figure out how to get this thing back to the lab."

"My lord, we've found no trace of the Flower of Life anywhere," the voice of an Invid lieutenant reported to the Regent.
"But that's impossible, you idiot!" the Regent shouted at his monitor. "This is their homeworld. They must be here! Scan the entire planet."
The flagship throne room, like the Invid castle and hives on Optera, was an organic chamber, so given over to the urgings of Protoculture that its very bulkheads and sensor devices resembled living systems of neural-tissue circuitry. Visceral greens and purples, they pulsed to rhythms dictated deep within the ship's animate drives. So, too, the contoured control couch itself, with its graceful curves, the slender arcing neck of its overhead sensor lamp, its proboscislike forward communicator tube. The Regent did not so much sit as reshape his being to the seat's demands.
On either side of him sat a Hellcat larger and more polished than any of the standard versions, with collars encrusted with gems handpicked from the spoils of a score of conquered worlds. Elsewhere, in cages, were living samples from those same worlds: sentient prisoners from Karbarra, Spheris, and the rest.
"We have searched, my lord," the trooper continued. "The Sensor Nebula registers no presence of the Flowers. None whatsoever."
"Fools!" muttered the Regent, canceling the transmission. He could hear his wife's laughter behind him.
"Congratulations, husband," the Regis mocked him from across the room. "Once again you have impressed us all with your supreme stupidity."
"I don't like your tone," the Regent said, turning to her.
One might have almost mistaken her for a humanoid life-form; certainly she was more that than the ursoid and vulpine beings that populated the Regent's personal zoo. But at the same time there was something ethereal and insubstantial about her, an inhumanness that lurked in the depths of her cobalt eyes. Twenty feet tall and slender, she clothed her completely hairless form in a red full-length robe and curious, five-fingered tasseled gloves. Four emerald-green sensor scarabs that might have been facelike adornments decorated the robe's bracelike collar and neck closure.
"I told you the Robotech Masters were too clever to hide the matrix in their own back yard."
"Silence, woman!" the Regent demanded, rising from the throne.
But the Regis stood her ground. "If you hadn't been so desperate to prove yourself a great warrior, we might have sent spies to learn where they've taken it."
The Regent looked at his wife in disbelief. "Are you forgetting who got us into this predicament in the first place? I'm not the one who fell under the spell of Zor and allowed him to steal our Flower of Life."
"Must you keep harping on that!" the Regis screamed, shutting her eyes and waving her fists in the air. "It happened a long time ago. And since then I have evolved, while you've remained the spoiled child you always were. You took his life; now you won't rest content until you've conquered his empire." She gestured offhandedly to the Regent's "pets" and caged life-forms. "You and your dreams of empire...Mark my words, husband, some day these beings will rise up to strike you down."
The Regent laughed. "Yes, you've evolved-into a pathetic imitation of the females of Zor's race."
"Perhaps so," she countered, arms akimbo. "But that's preferable to imitating the Masters' toys and bloodlust." She turned on her heel and headed for the door. "I'm returning to Optera."
"Stop! I forbid you to go!" the Regent told her, furious.
"Don't provoke me," she shouted from the doorway, "you spineless anachronism!"
"Wait!" the Regent demanded, cursing her. He whirled around as the door hissed closed, Tirol huge in the room's starboard viewports. "I'll show, you," he muttered under his breath. "Tirol will feel my potency...and I'll win back your love."

"Toys," Dr. Harry Penn told Lang, an undisguised note of disapproval in his voice. "War toys, when we could be fashioning wonders." He was a large man with a gruff-looking exterior that masked the gentlest of spirits. The thick mustache and beard he had grown to mask the pockmarked, hooked-nose cragginess of his face had only ended up adding to the effect he had hoped to minimize. It was a scholarly, academic image he was after, and as the oldest member of the Plenipotentiary Council and one of Lang's top men he felt he deserved no less.
"There'll be time for that when this mission returns," Lang said evenly. "Until then we have to be sure of our strengths."
Penn made a disgruntled sound. "A peaceful mission, a diplomatic mission...Am I the only one who remembers the meaning of those words?"
The two men were standing by one of the factory's observation bays; in the blackness of space beyond, two Veritechs were being put through the paces.
These were not the first generation VTs the Skull and other teams had flown against the Zentraedi, but Alpha fighters, the latest prototypes from Lang's research department laboratories. The SDF-3's arsenal wasn't limited to these reconfigurable one-pilot craft-the last six years had seen the development of Hovertanks, Logans, and an array of new and improved Destroids-but the Veritech remained something of Robotechnology's favored child, weapon extraordinaire and near-symbol of the war. The Alpha VT had more armor than its older sibling; it packed almost twice the firepower and was equipped with ablative shields and detachable augmentation pods for deepspace flight. Moreover, it had the capability to link up with the so-called Beta VT-a bulkier, thin-winged variant that appeared to lack an appropriate radome-and thereby more than double its range and occupancy capabilities.
Lang indicated the blue fighter as it twisted through space, reconfiguring to Guardian, then Battloid mode. "I just wanted you to see for yourself the progress we've made, Harry."
"Sterling, here," said a voice over the ob deck's speakers. "The Alpha handled the last sequence beautifully. No sign of stress."
"Fine, Max," said Lang, directing his words to a microphone. "The prototype looks good so far. Now comes the real test," he added for Penn's benefit. "Max, Karen, move yourselves into position for trans-docking maneuver."
Max rogered the transmission; Karen Penn, Harry's only daughter, said, "We're on our way."
Lang risked a quarter turn and found Penn regarding him with a mixture of surprise and rage. "You're awfully quiet, Harry, is something wrong?"
"Have you gone mad, Lang! You know I didn't want Karen participating in this test."
"What was I supposed to do, Harry, refuse her permission? Don't forget, she volunteered, and she's one of our most able young pilots."
"But I don't want her to get mixed up in this, Emil. Can't you understand that? Science is her future, not warfare."
"Control," Max's voice squawked over the speakers, "we are in position at T-niner-delta. Standing by to reconfigure and align for docking sequence."
The maneuver called for each of the Veritechs to jettison and exchange their unmanned Beta modules, blue to red, red to blue. Max carried out his part without a hitch, imaging over to fighter mode and engaging the VT's retros for a solid linkup with its sister module. But Karen slipped up. Max couldn't tell at first whether she had been too heavyminded, or had simply misread the VT's telemetry displays. In either case she was in trouble, the blue Beta off on a ride to eternity, and Karen in what looked like a planet-bound freefall.
Max tried to reach her on the net, through a cacophony of questions and exclamations from command-most of them from Dr. Penn himself. Karen wasn't responding, but there wasn't real cause for concern-yet. Assuming she wasn't unconscious or worse-something unseen, an embolism, perhaps-Karen had ample time to get herself into the Veritech's EVA suit; and failing that, the factory could bring its tractor beam to bear. But Max wanted to see Karen-pull out of this one without an assist; she was bright and full of potential, and he wanted her for the Skull.
"Stabilizers are gone," Karen said suddenly. "...Power surge must have fried the circuitry."
Then Dr. Penn's panicked voice bellowed in Max's ears. "Sterling, do something! You've got to help her!"
"Karen," Max said calmly. "Go to Guardian and bring your thrusters into play. I'm right behind you if they fail."
"Roger, Skull leader," Karen returned.
On the factory ob deck, Penn muscled his way through a crowd of techs to get close to the monitor screen. He sucked in his breath seeing his daughter's red Alpha in a slow-motion end-over-end fall; but the next instant found the VT reconfigured, its bird-of-prey foot thrusters burning bright in the night. And in another moment she was out of
danger and there were hoots and hollers ringing in his ears, tears of release in his eyes.