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

symbiotic course, interacting with their environment on a microorganic, even
subatomic, scale. Stranded from the synergistic biota of their planet, they
would not even be sentient beings.
But to outside life-forms, exposure to the atmosphere of Garuda and to
hin was a sentence of death by insanity.
Rem fought to hold onto some last shred of reality. The seemingly
endless memories of the Optera of long ago, and the paradise it had been-but
had he only dreamed them? Images of the Regent's estranged mate, the Regis,
and her passion for Zor, whose biogenetic material had been made manifest in
Rem's cloning-were they fever-dreams of the hin? But they had seemed so real,
not hallucinatory; more ordered and in focus than any dream or nightmare.
The Invid officers hoisted Rem to his feet with a clanking of his
chains. To Rem's addled and tormented senses, the cold tiles felt like
white-green frost that burned the soles of his feet and froze them at the same
time.
The Regent loomed before him, twenty feet high, massive and terrible,
his mantle spread like a cobra's hood as he gazed down through liquid black
eyes as big as manhole covers. Rem felt the hin seize him again, making the
breath in his lungs congeal and refuse to move.
Rem heard his own whimpering, felt his self-control about to slip from
his grasp. He had the abrupt impression that there were things in the shadows
waiting to pounce upon him and feast on his marrow, then take his mind and
steal his soul. And though a remote part of his intellect could recognize it
as the mind-wrenching effect of hin, he couldn't find the strength of will to
fight it.
"Stand him up straight," the Regent said, when Rem would have pulled
himself into a weeping fetal ball. "Hold his head up."
When Rem was standing up and staring, as wild-eyed as an animal with its
leg in a trap, the Regent went on. "You're a very difficult fellow, Tiresian.
Or should I say, `Clone'? Or better yet, `Zor-clone'?"
He held up four-fingered fists on wrists several times thicker than
Rem's waist. "Whatever you really are, here's something that might interest
you. Your Sentinel friends are coming."
Rem couldn't hide a wretched whimper of disbelief and despair mixed with
crazed hope. The Regent caught it. "That's right: they are coming directly
into my hands. To be imprisoned like you, to be put to the Inquisition like
you, and to go through all the pain and mind-probing you've gone through."
Rem was nearly in tears, but the Regent was leaning forward in the
colossal throne, drowning him out. "But it needn't happen that way! You can
save them, Zor-clone, and save yourself as well! The Haydon IV healers can
cure them and cure you, too, this very hour; you can leave with them-if you'll
simply say a few paltry words and give me what I want."
Rem was broken. Courage and conviction and strength and faith-and even
love-are overrated when it comes to defense against torture. Yet the Regent
failed to incorporate one thing into his equations-the one factor that no
agony could overcome: ignorance.
"Tell me where the last Protoculture matrix is," the Regent hissed.
"Tell me where the original Zor sent it-hid it! You have many of his
memories-how, I'm not sure. But that one must be there, it must!"
But it wasn't. If it had been, Rem would have yielded it up in a moment.