"Jack McKinney - Robotech 10 - Invid Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

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Robotech: Invid Invasion
Book 10 of the Robotech series
Copyright 1987 by Jack McKinney


PROLOGUE

Somewhere a queen was weeping...her children scattered; her regent a prisoner of the blood lust,
at war with nature and enslaved to vengeance.
But dare we presume to read her thoughts even now, to walk a path not taken-one denied to
us by gates and towers our senses cannot perceive and perhaps never will?
Still, it must have seemed like the answer to a prayer: A planet newly rich in the flower
that was life itself, a profusion of such incredible nutrient wealth that her Sensor Nebulae had
found it clear across the galaxy. A blue and white world as distant from her Optera as she was
from the peaceful form her consciousness once inhabited.
And yet Optera was lost to her, to half her children. Left in the care of one who had
betrayed his kind, who had become what he fought so desperately to destroy. As she herself had...
All but trapped now in the guise that he had worn, the one who lured the secrets of the
Flower from her. And whose giant warriors had returned to possess the planet and dispossess its
inhabitants. But oh, how she had loved him! Enough to summon from her very depths the ability to
emulate him. And later to summon a hatred keen enough to birth a warring nature, an army of
soldiers to rival his-to rival Zor's own!
But he, too, was lost to her, killed by the very soldiers her hatred had fashioned.
Oh, to be rid of these dark memories! her ancient heart must have screamed. To be rescued
from these sorry realms! Garuda, Spheris, Tirol. And this Haydon IV with its sterile flowers long
awaiting the caress of the Pollinators-this coq fused world even my Inorganics cannot subdue.
But she was aware that all these things would soon be behind her. She would gather the
cosmic stuff of her race and make the jump to that world the Sensor Nebulae had located. And woe
to the life form that inhabited that world! For nothing would prevent her from finding a home for
her children, a home for the completion of their grand evolutionary design!

News of the Invid exodus from Haydon IV spread through the Fourth Quadrant-to Spheris and
Garuda and Praxis, worlds already abandoned by the insectlike horde, worlds singled out by fate to
feel the backlash of Zor's attempt at recompense, nature's cruel joke.
The Tirolian scientist had attempted to foliate them with the same Flowers he had been
ordered to steal from Optera, an action that had sentenced that warm world's sentient life-form to
a desperate quest to relocate their nutrient grail. But Zor's experiments had failed, because the
Flower of Life proved to be a discriminating plant-choosy about where it would and would not put
down roots-and a malignantly loyal one as well.
Deriving as much from the Invid as the Invid derived from it, the Flower called out from
Zor's seeded worlds to its former guardian/hosts. Warlike and driven-instincts born of the
Robotech Masters' transgression-the Invid answered those calls. Their army of mecha and Inorganics
arrived in swarms to overwhelm and rule; and instead of the Protoculture paradises the founder of
Robotechnology had envisioned, were planets dominated by the beings his discoveries had all but
doomed.
And now suddenly they were gone, off on a new quest that would take them clear across the
galactic core.
To Earth...