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

From the cockpit's rear seat, where she was strapped into the copilot's
station, Bela reached forward to clap him on the shoulder. "That's the lad!
Kick their flaming arses! I'll loan you the boot!"
The vortices of fire came darting and circling, changing shape and
roiling-like silken scarves on the wind. All Jack's sensors were in alarm
mode, but none of them could tell him what 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.
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