"Jack McKinney - Robotech 12 - Symphony of Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

destroy this thing called man, she thought. But for some reason I cannot.
The Trooper who had pursued Lancer and Marlene through the woods appeared on the opposite
ledge now, but it, too, held its fire.
Lancer regarded the ship warily, then swung back around to confront the woman, who was
obviously in command of the situation. "Can't you understand me?!" he demanded. When he failed to
get a response, he altered his tone to one of cynical surrender. "Then get it over with. But spare
this woman. She's done no wrong."
Marlene and Sera met each other's gaze. And during the exchange, which Lancer thought
brief, a wealth of racial memories was transmitted.
That face...thought Marlene. It's as though time has stopped and I can look into my past
and my future simultaneously...
Sera's face had dissolved, but Marlene seemed to follow those flashphoto eyes on a journey
through space and time. Cosmic vistas opened up before her, stains and weblike filigrees of
brilliantly hued clouds, swirls and spirals of galactic stuff strewn like diamonds on velvet. She
beheld a vision of Optera through Sera's eyes, of the Invid as they were before the coming of Zor,
of the Flowers before the Fall. Then Sera's unconscious unlocked for her the horrors of days
since. Marlene saw the quest for their stolen grail; the transmutation of the race to an army of
relentless warriors, burdened with a need for mecha and Protoculture that rivaled the Masters'
own; the trip across the galaxy to this planet they now called their own; and the dispossession of
its indigenous beings, just as they themselves had once been dispossessed...
And there was a voice in Marlene's mind-one that she could not identify but that at the
same time seemed to be her own:
"Reach into the cosmic consciousness of your race, Ariel," the voice told her. "And
although you feel you are dreaming, watch send observe the beauty of your home. For we are a race
of powerful beings destined to control the universe with our intellect and power, and you, Ariel,
are a part of that power. Come back to us, my child; come back, Ariel, and rejoin the hive..."
Marlene stared at Sera as her face took form once again, the journey through space-time
concluded, and thought: I know her: we're like sisters somehow...
Then without warning, explosions were rocking the ledge and erupting around the base of
Sera's command ship. Scott and the rest of the team had positioned themselves on the ridgeline
above the gully and were firing bursts against the command ship and its sole minion.
Momentarily confused by the renewed fighting, Sera broke off her contact with Marlene and
returned to the cockpit of her ship, lifting off at once and joining her charge on the opposite
side of the chasm. But no sooner did she touch down than the ledge gave way and the two dropped
together, impacting rocks and outcroppings as they fell.
Lunk and Rand pulled Lancer and Marlene to safety. It seemed unbelievable that they had
all survived and that all their crazed plans had worked. But even more unsettling was the Human
pilot who had once again demonstrated a bewildering ambivalence. Scott refused to believe that the
woman had purposely stayed her hand; he pointed out how she had fired on him earlier without
compunction. Lancer, however, knew better than to accept Scott's explanation that the woman had
been distracted by their sudden fire. And he also saw that something inexplicable had transpired
between the woman and Marlene. Both Rand and Annie had been touched by the Invid consciousness in


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the past, but their psychic encounters had been brief and transient. Marlene, on the other hand,
had been profoundly affected.
"I don't belong with you," Marlene told Lancer later, when the others had moved off in the