"Jack McKinney - Robotech Sentientals 4 - World Killers" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

it. "Okay then: we shoot craps. It's bath time, Crysta! Brace for a
splashdown!"
Lron, Learna, and Kami closed in, too, applying all thrusters to help
slow Crysta's fall and shove her ship into position over the large underground
lake or sea that Learna had spied. The distant sparkle of the water pinwheeled
up and up at them with frightening speed. In the last seconds, they were able
to reduce the speed of their fall-then the water smashed into them.
Jack felt as if his neck had been snapped, and he was aware of water
bubbling and surging against his canopy. Any conventional aerospace craft
would have broken or sprung a thousand leaks, but somehow the Alpha held. Jack
broke the surface to see Lron's Beta still fighting desperately to keep
Crysta's afloat.
Jack hit his burners and lifted clear of the water on trails of blue
flame. Crysta's ship was no longer encased in the energy antibodies, but its
fuselage looked broken, and it was no doubt taking on water. Janice Em's Alpha
appeared next to it, helping Lron try to keep it from sinking, the water
boiling and hissing from the blast of their thrusters, but it was a losing
battle.
"Just hold on a second more!" Jack yelled. "Crysta, I'm getting you out
of there!"

His Alpha extruded the special manipulator tentacles that were built
into all VTs. In another moment, they had stretched forth to open access
plates on one of the damaged Beta's nacelles. It only took a moment for them
to work the manual controls for the emergency-rescue system.
The entire cockpit module of Crysta's Beta slid free from the rest of
the ship; Jack took it up in his Battloid's armored hands even while his
manipulators were retracting. "Okay, get clear! I've got her!"
Lron and Janice released their hold on the Beta, and it sank from sight
in a fountain of bubbles and froth, steam rising from the water. Jack had
risen clear and was sliding the cockpit module into a special fitting on the
underside of his Battloid's right forearm.
"Just relax and enjoy the ride." Jack tried to sound light-hearted, but
he was scanning his new surroundings and checking out his sensors, expecting
another attack. He wasn't so sure the VTs could survive another fight.
"I cannot fathom it," Bela was saying. "Why would this Haydon IV of
Veidt's have an underground sea? Is it not, as he and Sarna have told us,
a-what was their phrase?- an artificial world!"
"That's what they said, all right," Janice Em added. "Only, personally,
this wasn't what I pictured."
Nor had Jack. He had imagined a more elaborate kind of O'Neill colony,
perhaps, or even a miniature Dyson sphere, but not something truly
planet-size.
But it was indisputably an artifact of some kind. Beginning at the
shores of the lake, fantastic underground mountains reared, looking to Jack
like living instrumentality-inorganic versions of living forms and ecosystems.
Veidt and Sarna and the few other Haydonites among the Sentinels had
been either unable or unwilling to give exact explanations as to how things
worked here, and Jack began to curse them for it now.
Jan was continuing, "If the whole place really is an artifact, one of