"Jack McKinney - Kaduna Memories" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

Larissa shook her head in amusement. "You go too far. Who else did you send?"

"Nerd's onboard somewhere," Nugget said sheepishly.

"Oh, Clay"тАФshe laughedтАФ"not Nerd. He can't even stay on his feet half the time."

Nugget shrugged. "I gave Kakis my word I'd keep my hands off the Series Threes. Besides, Nerd'll do
fine as long as he doesn't have to leave his station." He swiveled into the console once more. "Report
status," he told the robot crew. The reply arrived as data readouts on a peripheral screen. Everything
looked good onboard. "Radar: forward-lookingтАФ" he began when Larissa restrained his hand.

"I think we better let Kakis in on this from the get-go," she told him. "There are protocols to follow from
this point on." She answered his look by adding "I didn't want to tell you, Clay. I wanted you to seeтАФ"

"Then there is something out there."

"I'm going to leave it to you to tell me what it is."

Nugget fell silent for a moment, staring deeply into his wife's gray eyes, then hit the command center
comm stud. Larissa took it from there. "Commander Kakis, we've got a visual on the disturbance source.
I'd like to put it onscreen, if you've no objections."

" 'It?' "Kakis said.

"It, sir."

"Go ahead, Doctor."

Larissa nodded and Nugget executed the probe's radar command. What appeared onscreen a moment
later took his breath away.

"Nugget!" the commander shouted over a buzz of background laughter in the command center. "If those
goddamned robots are behind this тАж"
"They're not sophisticated enough to pull it off," Nugget said in monotone, too stunned to bring any
"emotion to the reply.

Kakis was suitably convinced to stammer "T-then tell me what the hell I'm looking at!"

An insect, Nugget was tempted to tell him. A monstrously huge purple-carapaced insect, with a single,
equilaterally triangular wing that must have been all of a kilometer wide along its base. The wing rose at a
forty-five-degree angle from a body that was a mind-boggling mix of bedbug and flying saucer. There
were no legs as such, save for twin footlike protrusions that dangled either side of the thing's clamshell
hind end. The "feet" emerged from between two rear-oriented projections that might have been antennae
or cannons, but for all the world resembled outsize cotton swabs.

The thing's most compelling features, however, were the flaglike drives it trailed behind on rigid filaments
formed from the same purple material that made up its pyramidal wing and body parts.

The RPV was closing on it from a distance of several hundred kilometers. Nugget finally worked up the
wherewithal to order the probe's pilot to negate all approach commands.