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

Regent's estranged mate, the Regis, and her passion for Zor, whose biogenetic material had been
made manifest in Rem's cloning-were they fever-dreams of the hin? But they had seemed so real, not
hallucinatory; more ordered and in focus than any dream or nightmare.
The Invid officers hoisted Rem to his feet with a clanking of his chains. To Rem's addled
and tormented senses, the cold tiles felt like white-green frost that burned the soles of his feet
and froze them at the same time.
The Regent loomed before him, twenty feet high, massive and terrible, his mantle spread
like a cobra's hood as he gazed down through liquid black eyes as big as manhole covers. Rem felt
the hin seize him again, making the breath in his lungs congeal and refuse to move.
Rem heard his own whimpering, felt his self-control about to slip from his grasp. He had
the abrupt impression that there were things in the shadows waiting to pounce upon him and feast
on his marrow, then take his mind and steal his soul. And though a remote part of his intellect
could recognize it as the mind-wrenching effect of hin, he couldn't find the strength of will to
fight it.
"Stand him up straight," the Regent said, when Rem would have pulled himself into a
weeping fetal ball. "Hold his head up."
When Rem was standing up and staring, as wild-eyed as an animal with its leg in a trap,
the Regent went on. "You're a very difficult fellow, Tiresian. Or should I say, `Clone'? Or better
yet, `Zor-clone'?"
He held up four-fingered fists on wrists several times thicker than Rem's waist. "Whatever
you really are, here's something that might interest you. Your Sentinel friends are coming."
Rem couldn't hide a wretched whimper of disbelief and despair mixed with crazed hope. The
Regent caught it. "That's right: they are coming directly into my hands. To be imprisoned like
you, to be put to the Inquisition like you, and to go through all the pain and mind-probing you've
gone through."
Rem was nearly in tears, but the Regent was leaning forward in the colossal throne,
drowning him out. "But it needn't happen that way! You can save them, Zor-clone, and save yourself
as well! The Haydon IV healers can cure them and cure you, too, this very hour; you can leave with
them-if you'll simply say a few paltry words and give me what I want."


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Rem was broken. Courage and conviction and strength and faith-and even love-are overrated
when it comes to defense against torture. Yet the Regent failed to incorporate one thing into his
equations-the one factor that no agony could overcome: ignorance.
"Tell me where the last Protoculture matrix is," the Regent hissed. "Tell me where the
original Zor sent it-hid it! You have many of his memories-how, I'm not sure. But that one must be
there, it must!"
But it wasn't. If it had been, Rem would have yielded it up in a moment. That escape was
closed to him, though.
Rem laid his head to his chest and sobbed. Deep in the hin, he felt the sunlight jeering
at him, his fear-sweat turning to acid against his skin, panic closing off his windpipe.
He heard the creak as the Regent rose from his chair. "Above all things, I despise
stubbornness. That, I punish."

Lynn-Minmei tried to stop the passageway from spinning as she lurched along, her hand held
by the mysterious VT pilot; she was barefoot and disheveled, sick with the drinks she had downed
but sicker still with her latest and worst glimpse of Human nature.