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

Janice Em had laid down fire with her Wolverine assault rifle, but
powerful as it was, it wasn't very effective. The shots seemed to make the
snakes take notice of her and move to converge on her. On sudden impulse, she
took the weapon and hurled it as far from her as she could. Snakes were on it
even as it clattered to the decking, striking at it as if the rifle were a
living enemy.
"Get rid of your Protoculture weapons!" she yelled over the net. "That's
how they're sensing us!"
Jack had gathered up his own gear, but now he threw aside his Wolverine
and his Shiva energy handgun as well. All around him, the others were doing
the same. As each discarded weapon landed, snakes piled onto it, striking at
it with bites that sent up fireworks and scoria.
The party moved away from the capsules carefully, picking their way
among snakes that only seemed interested in getting at the ejection modules.
There were detonations from the besieged Battloids as they toppled or erupted
from the effect of the snakebites.
Jack's little command took shelter behind a bank of cognizance relays,
ducking away from the final, bright explosions that obliterated the mecha. At
Jack's command, those who weren't wearing flight helmets kept their hands over
their ears and their mouths wide open, so that they wouldn't be deafened.
Wreckage whirled and debris ricocheted off the walls of the machine-cavern.
Jack was already taking stock of his situation, and there was nothing
about it that made him want to do victory rolls. True, they still had
conventional firearms and the Praxian, Garudan, and Karbarran weapons. And the
handheld inertial trackers would give them a direction of sorts. But there
were only the limited emergency rations of food and water in the ejection
packs, and no viable hope of raising Vince Grant or the others up on the
surface with the flight-helmet communicators.
Most of the equipment the team had brought along had been destroyed with
the VTs. They were more like a bunch of marooned survivors than a raiding
party.
But there was one critical thing in their favor: the snakes were
ignoring them. Now that the Battloids were smoking wreckage, the snakes seemed
to be dissolving away, perhaps returning to whatever fabrication matrices had
given them form. Powerful blasts of fire-fighting gas belched from fixtures
all around the remains of the Battloids, extinguishing the fires, and
tremendous ventilators created a minor windstorm, drawing away the fumes.
"Walking is good healthy exercise anyway, so my mom used to tell me,"
Bela said cheerfully, getting to her feet. She was checking over her crossbow
and resettling the two-handed shortsword she carried. Clearly, her skintight
REF flightsuit was less comfortable to her than the rather daring fighting
costume she usually wore.
Gnea, looking like a giant, lissome seventeen-year-old, went to join her
friend and mentor. Gnea held one of the naginatalike Praxian halberds, a
polearm with a curved, glittering head and a wicked spike set at the opposite
end. Jack had seen the two use their weapons in combat, and had learned the
foolishness of underestimating primitive arms.
He checked his inertial locator; there was no use going back, and so
Glike was their only hope now. But then he noticed Janice, standing to one
side, distracted. She looked as if she were listening to some distant siren