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

there were some light sources in the labyrinth of living instrumentality, the
Veritechs brought up all their wing-lights and spotlights to cut through the
gloom.
Jan scouted several conduits and accessways. Twice, the team pulled back
to the brink of the sea to start over again because the route had narrowed to
a squeeze so tight that the Battloids couldn't get through. The third try was
a washout due to extremely high radiation levels; the VTs would protect their
occupants for quite a while, but Jack had no idea how long the journey would
take, and had no desire to end up as a human night-light.
The fourth try brought them into a sort of pipeline all aglow with the
colors of the rainbow. The sensors couldn't determine what the light effects
were, but they didn't seem harmful, and time was wasting. "Let's do it," Jack
decided.
The team moved along like infantry, or SWAT officers, Lron covering the
rear in a kind of crabstep, the enormous rifle/cannon of the Beta held at high
port. The pipeline's diameter was about thirty feet, not much higher than the
Battloids, and so the mecha moved cautiously.
In some places, the route was lined with pulsing bundles of filament as
thick as a mecha's leg-like brilliant gatherings of unshielded optical fibers.
In others, intertwinings of mysterious ducting and hoses resembled an
incredible Robotech root system. Stupendous struts and support members were
the geology of the underground world.
Gradually, though, the "terrain" started changing. The pipeline widened
again, and the Battloids had as much room as foot soldiers moving along a
highway. A world of dazzling, incomprehensible supertech complexity surrounded
them. Light danced and tremendous loads of power surged and hummed.
It was a technological reflection of the nearby Arabian Nights cityscape
in Glike. But, the manifestations were above, as well as around and below.
Ziggurat power-management terminals bigger than any Egyptian pyramid;
enigmatic things that looked like Van de Graaff generators the size of the
Monument City Sportsdome; megastructures of warped, prismatic light that on
closer inspection turned out to be mountains of contoured instrumentality.
As their route opened up into a kind of open countryside, they began to
lose the oppressive feeling of being underground. That is, until Jan's voice
came over the net.
"I'm picking up readings. I think these immunosystems, or whatever they
are, are beginning to detect and respond to us again."
"What? Where?" Jack was punching buttons, searching frantically. "I
don't see anything." Don't tell me she's a sensor wizard, too!
"Trust me, Jack." Her voice was so steady that he believed her. "There's
something big ahead, something very big. Perhaps the nexus of everything that
Haydon is, and now that we've stumbled so close to it, whatever it is, it's
got a line on us again."
Jack didn't have time to ask her what she was jabbering about, because
just then Kami yelled, "Snakes, snakes! Millions of em!"
Jack whirled even as Kami fired, forgetting the lessons about short,
accurate bursts, the Garudan's Battloid hosing its rifle/cannon back and forth
like a Robotech fireman.
The others were blazing away, too. Jack could see that whatever Kami
spotted wasn't really snakes; but the undulating, crackling flows of green and