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

Cabell laughed from the blackness deeper in. "Till they leave? You're an optimist, my boy."

From his quarters on the Invid flagship, the Regent watched the descent of the Menace with obvious delight. In a moment the hydra-ship was bellowing its arrival, three sets of jaws opening to belch forth squadrons of Enforcer troops, the invasion group's mop-up crew and police force. They rode one-pilot strike ships, golden-colored tubularshaped crafts with hooded, open-air cockpits and globular propulsion systems. They picked up where the command ships left off, dispatching what remained of Tiresia's pitiful defenses. As scenes of death and destruction played across the viewscreen, the Regent urged his troops on, mouth approximating a smile, sensor antennae suffused with color. But follow-up transmissions from the moon's surface were enough to erase that momentary blush.
"Scanners continue to register negative on all fronts, my lord."
The ground troops had completed their sweep of Tiresia, but the Regent still wasn't convinced. "You're certain there's nowhere else the Robotech Masters might have concealed the Flowers?"
"Yes, my lord. We would have detected even the slightest trace."
The Regent leaned back in the control couch. "Very well," he said after a brief silence. "I wash my hands of this wretched world. Do what you will, my legions."
He had expected an immediate response, an affirmation of his command, but instead the lieutenant risked a suggestion. "Pardon me, my lord, but shouldn't we delay the extermination until they've told us everything they know?"
"Good point," the Regent replied after he had gotten over the soldier's audacity. "Have your units round up any survivors at once, and prepare them for questioning. We shall see if we can't persuade them to tell us where their Masters have taken the Flowers of Life. I shall conduct the inquisition myself. Inform me when you have secured the city."
"It is done, my lord." The soldier signed off.
The city's temples became prisons. Those Tiresians who survived the enforcers' roundup, who survived the plasma hell they poured into the breached shelters, were packed shoulder to shoulder in improvised holding zones. They were a sorry lot, these bruised and battered sackcloth-clad humanoids; but even greater indignities awaited them. Some knew this and envied the clones, all dead now. For the first time in generations no clones walked Fantoma's moon. Save one, that is...
"Are they bringing more in?" a man asked his fellow prisoners as the temple's massive door was opened, admitting light into their midst. "These monsters mean to smother us alive."
"Quiet, they'll hear you," someone nearby said.
But the man saw no reason to remain still. "Invader, what do you want from us?" he shouted when the Regent's huge form appeared in the doorway.
The Invid looked down at them, his antennae throbbing and hood puffed up. "You know very well what I want-the Flower of Life." He reached out and plucked the man from the crowd, his four-fingered hand fully encompassing the man's head. "Tell me where it is."
"Never-"
"You fool," the Regent rasped as he lifted the man to shoulder height, applying pressure as he dangled him over the screaming prisoners. The man's hands flailed wildly against the Regent's grip. "Where are the Flowers?"
The Tiresian's responses were muffled, panicked. "We don't know-"
"Tell me, you insignificant little worm!" the Regent said, and crushed the man's skull.
"We know nothing;" someone in the crowd shouted. "The Masters never told us of such things!"
"My friend, I believe you," the Regent said after a moment. He released the now lifeless body. "Enforcer," he added, turning aside, "reward these creatures for their honesty."
The lieutenant stiffened. "At once, my lord." While the Regent exited the hall, the enforcer armed a spherical device and tossed it over his shoulder before the doors shut, sealing the prisoners inside.
An old man caught the device and sadly regarded its flashing lights. "What does it mean?" someone asked in a horror-stricken voice.
The old man forced himself to swallow. "It means our doom," he said softly.
The explosion took most of the temple with it.

Returned to his flagship, the Regent met with his scientists. They were barefoot beings much like himself, although no taller than the soldiers, dressed in unadorned white trousers and sashed jackets suggestive of oriental robes. In the presence of their king, they kept their arms folded across their chests, hands tucked inside jacket cuffs.
"Tell me what you know," the Regent asked them, despondent after this brief visit to Tirol's surface. "Is this moon as worthless as it seems?"
"We have yet to find any trace of the Flower," their spokesman said in a modulated voice. "And most of the population is too old and sickly to serve as slave labor. I'm afraid there is very little of use to us here."
"Perhaps it will simply take more digging to find what we seek. Come," the Regent instructed their overseer, Obsim, "there is something I wish to discuss with you."
As they walked-through an enormous hold lined top to bottom with Shock Troopers, Pincer and Command ships, and inward toward the very heart of the flagship-the Regent explained his position.
"Just because the Regis is somewhat more evolved than I am, she treats me like I just crawled from the swamp. I fear she'll try to undermine my authority; that's why this mission must succeed."
"I understand," Obsim said.
"I'm placing you in charge of the search on Tirol. The Inorganics will be your eyes and ears. Use them to uncover the secrets of this place."
Obsim inclined his head in a bow. "If this world holds any clue to the matrix's whereabouts, I will find it."
"See that you do," the Regent added ominously.
A transparent transport tube conveyed them weightlessly to the upper levels of the ship, where the Invid brain was temporarily housed. The brain was just that, a towering fissured and convoluted organ of Protoculture instrumentality enclosed in a hundred-foot-high bubble chamber filled with clear liquid.
The Regent's attempt to emulate the Masters' Protoculture Caps: his living computer.
King and scientist stood at the chamber's pulsating, bubbled base.
"The invasion is complete," the Regent directed up to the brain. "I have brought Tirol to its knees."
A synaptic dazzle spread across the underside of the instrument brain, tickling what might have been the pituitary body, the pons varolii, and corpora albicantia. The brain spoke. "And yet your search for the matrix continues."
"For a while longer, yes," the Regent confirmed in defense of his actions, the chamber effervescence reflected in his glossy black eyes.
"Find Zor's ship and you will have what you seek. Not until then." The brain seemed to aspirate its words, sucking them in so that its speech resembled a tape played in reverse.
"You've been talking to the Regis again!" the Regent growled. "You expect me to search for a ship that could be halfway across the galaxy?"
"Calculations suggest that such a journey would constitute a minor drain on existing Protoculture reserves when compared to these continued assaults against the Masters' realms."
"That may very well be," the Regent was willing to concede, "but conquest is growth. Conquest is evolvement!" He turned to Obsim. "My orders stand: section the brain. Transport the cutting to the surface to guide the Inorganics. Bring me what I seek and I will make you master of your own world. Fail, and I will leave you to rot on this ball of dust for an eternity."


CHAPTER FIVE
What with all the major players from the RDF and the Southern Cross in attendance (at the Hunters' wedding), one would have expected at least one newsworthy incident; but in fact the only negative scene was one touched off by Lynn-Minmei's song, which provoked exclamations of disapproval from a few members of the Sisterhood Society. "We'll be together," the chorus went, "as married man and wife." Here was Lisa Hayes, first officer of the SDFs 1 and 2, admiral of the fleet, and commander of the entire SDF-3, suddenly reduced by Minmei's lyric to Rick Hunter's wife!