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

Word of their departure reached Rick Hunter aboard the Sentinel's ships. He was in the
command seat on the fortress bridge when the communiqu├й was received. Thin and pale, a war-weary
veteran of countless battles, Rick was almost thirty-five years old by Earth reckoning, but the
vagaries of hyperspace travel put him closer to fifty or two hundred and seventy, depending on how
one figured it.
The giant planet Fantoma, once home to the Zentraedi, filled the forward viewports. In the
foreground Rick could just discern the small inhabited moon called Tirol, an angry dot against
Fantoma's barren face. How could such an insignificant world have unleashed so much evil on an
unsuspecting galaxy? Rick wondered.
He glanced over at Lisa, who was humming to herself while she tapped a flurry of commands
into her console. His wife. They had stayed together through thick and thin these past eleven
years, although they had had their share of disagreements, especially when Rick had opted to join
the Sentinels-Baldon, Teal, Crysta, and the others-and pursue the Invid.



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Who would have thought it would come to this? he asked himself. A mission whose purpose
had been peace at war with itself. Edwards and his grand designs of empire...how like the Invid
regent he was, how like the Masters, too! But he was history now, and that fleet he had raised to
conquer Earth would be used to battle the Invid when the Expeditionary Force reached the planet.
Providing the fleet reached Earth, of course. There were still major problems with the
spacefold system Lang and the Tirolian Cabell had designed. Some missing ingredient...Major
Carpenter had never been heard from, nor Wolff; and now the Mars and Jupiter Group attack wings
were preparing to fold, with almost two thousand Veritechs between them.
Rick exhaled slowly and deliberately, loud enough for Lisa to hear him and turn a thin
smile his way. Somehow it was fitting that Earth should end up on the Invid's list, Rick decided.
But what could have happened there to draw them in such unprecedented numbers? Rick shuddered at
the thought.
Perhaps Earth was where the final battle was meant to be fought.

Ravaged by the Robotech Masters and their gargantuan agents, the Zentraedi, it was a
miracle that Earth had managed to survive at all. Looking on the planet from deep space, it would
have appeared unchanged: its beautiful oceans and swirling masses of cloud, its silver satellite,
bright as any beacon in the quadrant. But a closer look revealed the scars and disfigurations
those invasions had wrought. The northern hemisphere was all but a barren waste, forested by the
rusting remains of Dolza's ill-fated four-million-ship armada. Great cities of gleaming concrete,
steel, and glass towers lay ruined and abandoned. Wide highways and graceful bridges were cratered
and collapsed. Airports, schools, hospitals, sports complexes, industrial and residential
zones...reduced to rubble, unmarked graveyards all.
A fifteen-year period of peace-that tranquil prologue to the Masters' arrival-saw the
resurrection of some of those things the twentieth century had all but taken for granted. Cities
had rebuilt themselves, new ones had grown up. But humankind was now a different species from that
which had originally raised those towering sculptures of stone. Post-Cataclysmites, they were a
feudal, warring breed, as distrustful of one another as they were of those stars their hopeful
ancestors had once wished upon. Perhaps, as some have claimed, Earth actually called in its second
period of catastrophe, as if bent on adhering to some self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. The
Masters, too, for that matter: The two races met and engaged in an unspoken agreement for mutual