"Jack McKinney - Robotech 16 - World Killers" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

he was facing.
Fire with fire, he told himself fatalistically, and put a burst of pumped laser into the
first one to come into range.
Somehow Tesla got on the tac net. "No, you fool! You're signing our death warrants!"
"Don't bother me; I'm workin'," Jack growled.
The cannonfire seemed to have no effect; the vortice changed course a bit and came
straight for him. He shot it again. The other VTs chose targets of opportunity and opened up, too.
The vortices flared angrily, and some were jarred, but they kept coming. More came from
what seemed to be an opening in the countryside below, like flecks of incandescent paint falling
upward.
Jack was still firing when the first vortex hit him. It flared angrily against his
shields, sending the indicators toward the danger zones, and it seemed he could feel the infernal
heat right through the fuselage. More swarmed after.


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The other VTs were struck, too. The vortices spread across them, coating them in a
blinding radiance.

"Wake up! Come, come; I have no time for this nonsense! Wake him!"
Rem heard the thick, moist rumbling voice, loud enough to echo and shake the walls. He
associated it with the sensation he felt now: bonds still holding his raw, bleeding wrists and
ankles, and the cottony blur the Invid psy-scanners had left in his brain.
At the Regent's command, Invid officers applied brief pain to speed up the effects of the
reviving injections they had given him. Rem squirmed and moaned, shaking off part of the fog, and
opened his eyes.
Rem saw the throne room that the Regent had decreed for himself high in a Haydon IV tower.
It was a minor mercy to see the light of Briz'dziki, the local sun, rather than the cold insides
of the Invid's nearby hive.
Rem tried to recall what he was doing there, and it came back in a confused, horrifying
rush. Capture by the Invid on Garuda; exposure to Garudan atmosphere-why wasn't he dead, or mad?
Or, perhaps he was-perhaps he was both.
No, he wasn't dead; the pain of his shackles was a branding-hot clarity too sharp for
that. But mad...
As he struggled feebly, he heard a low, mosquitolike humming that quickly built until it
shock-waved from one side of his skull to the other. The shackles seemed to grow teeth and gnaw at
his wrists, promising to devour their way up his arms and legs, ripping and savaging.
Rem screamed. The Invid stench coagulated with evil glee in his chest-he was sure he would
suffocate.
Not mad, then-but even more terribly, a victim of hin, the Garudan altered-reality or
transcendent state.
Kami and Learna and their people thrived that way-in hin-as a matter of symbiotic course,
interacting with their environment on a microorganic, even subatomic, scale. Stranded from the
synergistic biota of their planet, they would not even be sentient beings.
But to outside life-forms, exposure to the atmosphere of Garuda and to hin was a sentence
of death by insanity.
Rem fought to hold onto some last shred of reality. The seemingly endless memories of the
Optera of long ago, and the paradise it had been-but had he only dreamed them? Images of the