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

song to which the rest of them were deaf.
"It's near," she whispered. "Somewhere close, and it's aware of us."
Burak, horned like an auroch, who had ridden with her, looked at her
strangely.
"What is?" Crysta asked. She was pumping up the globlar reservoir of her
long Karbarran pneumatic rifle with its hinged forestock lever. "Janice, what
is it you perceive?"
"Haydon IV the artificial world has a mind, an Awareness," Janice said,
as if in a dream. "And the seat of that Awareness, its nexus, is not far
away."
She knew it was true, but couldn't understand how the knowledge had been
given to her. She turned to them. "We must go to it!"
"Huh-uh." Jack was shrugging into his packstraps. "They'll be waiting
for us up there in Glike, remember? Admiral Hunter, and Karen and the rest?
People we're supposed to rescue? I admit things haven't exactly been beer and
skittles so far, but we're not gonna let 'em down. We stick to the plan."
Janice Em found that she couldn't answer. She felt like a double image
on a monitor screen, ghostly twins standing side by side. The whirlpool of
thoughts and sensory impulses that spun within her had stolen her voice,
immobilized her. Vast forces were vying within her.
She had a sudden sense of Lang-not of the Robotech genius's physical
presence, but rather of his voice, his intellect. Intentionally submerged
memories had surfaced in this moment of crisis. Changes were triggered in the
being the REF and the Sentinels-and even Minmei-knew as Janice Em.
As she transformed her companions drew away from her.


CHAPTER SIX
Anybody who says million-to-one odds are unbeatable never had Breetai standing
on their side of the scales at the weigh-in.
Lisa Hayes Hunter, Recollections

There was no reality, no orderly flow of time, no ground underfoot or
substantial object that she could touch. She was in a void, without form, as
she had been for so long.
Then things began to impinge upon her. It came to her that her name was
Karen Penn. Other facts and memories and realizations coalesced.
She was a member of the Sentinels by way of the Robotech Expeditionary
Force. Her mother had died in childbirth, and her father held that against
Karen to this day. There was another young officer, Jack Baker, whom she-
She blocked that thought out. But there were more-the memory of how she
had been poisoned by the atmosphere of Garuda, swept up in the hallucinatory
expanded mind-state the Garudans called hin, a state for which the human mind
had never been intended. Then there were the nightmares, the visions, the
visitations of the endless mindstorm of the hin. Some had been horrible, some
of terrible beauty, but all had strained her grip on her sanity and the very
functions of her autonomic nervous system.
The flickering spark of her life had been all but out when without
warning something seemed to be fanning it, encouraging it to glow and grow
brighter. Then there was an almost physical feeling, as if she were being