"Jack McKinney - Robotech 08 - Metal Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

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Robotech: Metal Fire
Book Eight of the Robotech Series
Copyright 1987 by Jack McKinney


CHAPTER ONE
EXEDORE: So, Admiral, there is little doubt: [Zentraedi and Human] genetic makeup points directly
at a common point of origin.
ADMIRAL GLOVAL: Incredible.
EXEDORE: Isn't it. Furthermore, while examining the data we noticed many common traits, including
a penchant on the part of both races to indulge in warfare...Yes, both races seem to enjoy making
war.
From Exedore's intel reports to the SDF-2 High Command

Once before, an alien fortress had crashed on Earth...
Its arrival had put an end to almost ten years of global civil war; and its resurrection
had ushered in armageddon. That fortress's blackened, irradiated remains lay buried under a
mountain of earth, heaped upon it by the very men and women who had rebuilt the ship on what would
have been its island grave. But unbeknownst to those who mourned its loss, the soul of that great
ship had survived the body and inhabited it still-an entity living in the shadows of the
technology it animated, waiting to be freed by its natural keepers, and until then haunting the
world chosen for its sorry exile...
This new fortress, this most recent gift from heaven's more sinister side, had announced
its arrival, not with tidal and tectonic upheavals, but with open warfare and devastation-death's
bloodstained calling cards. Nor was this fortress derelict and uncontrolled in its fateful fall
but driven, brought down to Earth by the unwilling minor players in its dark drama...

"ATAC Fifteen to air group!" Dana Sterling yelled into her mike over the din of battle.
"Hit 'em again with everything you have! Try to keep their heads down! They're throwing everything
but old shoes at us down here!"
Less than twenty-four hours ago her team, the 15th squad, Alpha Tactical Armored Corps,
had felled this giant, not with sling and shot, but with a coordinated strike launched at the
fortress's Achilles' heel-the core reactor governing the ship's bio-gravitic network. It had
dropped parabolically from geosynchronous orbit, crashlanding in the rugged hills several
kilometers distant from Monument City.
Hardly a coincidental impact point, Dana said to herself as she bracketed the fortress in
the sights of the Hovertank's rifle/cannon.
The 15th, in Battloid mode, was moving across a battle zone that was like some geyser
field of orange explosions and high-flung dirt and rock-a little like a cross between a moonscape
and the inside of Vesuvius on a busy day.
Up above, the TASC fighters, the Black Lions among them, roared in for another pass. The
glassy green teardrop-cannon of the fortress didn't seem as effective in atmosphere, and so far
there had been no sign of the snowflake-shields. But the enemy's hull, rearing above the
assaulting Battloids, still seemed able to soak up all the punishment they could deal it and stand
unaltered.
An elongated hexagon, angular and relatively flat, the alien fortress measured over five
miles in length, half that in width. Its thickly plated hull was the same lackluster gray of the
Zentraedi ships used in the First Robotech War; but in contrast to those organic leviathan