"Jack McKinney - Sentinels 01 - Devils Hand" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

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Jack McKinney - Sentinels 1 - Devils Hand

Copyright 1988 by Jack McKinney

CHAPTER ONE

I leave it up to the historians and the moralists to judge whether our decision (the Expeditionary mission)
is right or wrong. I know only that it is prudent and necessary-necessary for our very survival both as a
planet and as a life form. If the Protoculture has taught me anything, it is that one must simply act! When
all is said and done the inevitabilities and reshapings will have their way, but to remain either complacent
or inert in the face of those fatalities is to invite catastrophe of a higher order than any of us dare imagine.

From the personal journal of Dr. Emil Lang

In the middle of the night on an alien world, an army of insentient warriors dropped from the sky. Tirol,
as this small moon was known, represented a prize of sorts-the end of a long campaign that had taken
the invaders through a dozen local star systems and across the varied faces of twice that number of
worlds-the remote realms of the once great empire of the Robotech Masters, forged and secured by their
giant soldier clones, the Zentraedi. But Tirol itself was all but deserted, abandoned almost a generation
earlier by those same Masters. So in effect this conquest was something of a disappointment for the
horde who had raised savagery to new heights, something of a nonevent.

But just as a rock tossed into a pond will make its presence known to distant shores, the Invid's arrival
on Tirol would send powerful waves through the continuum; and nowhere would the effects of their
invasion be more greatly felt than on the world already inundated by previous tides from this same
quarter-a blue-white gem of a planet that had seen better days, but was struggling still to regain control of
its own fragile destiny...

Earth had captured its second satellite in the year 2013, when a joint Terran and XT force had wrested it
from the control of the Zentraedi commander, Reno, faithful to the Imperative even after Dolza's fiery
demise. The factory satellite was an enormous monstrosity, well in keeping with the grotesque design of
the Zentraedi fleet, that had been folded instantaneously through space-time by Protoculture-fueled
Reflex drives. It was radish-shaped and rose-colored in starlight, with fissures and convolutions
suggestive of cerebral matter. Attached along its median section by rigid stalklike transport tubes were
half a dozen secondary sacs and appendages, smaller by far, but equally vegetal in aspect, veined and
incomprehensible.

There were some 15,000 Humans and Zentraedi living onboard, a sizable portion of Earth's
post-apocalyptic population. The majority of these men and women had labored for six years inside the
factory's weightless belly to construct a starship, a dimensional fortress soon to be Tirolbound-there to
confront the Robotech Masters, and with luck curtail any threat of continued warfare.

Among those onboard were Vice Admiral Rick Hunter and his close friend and trusted commander, Max
Sterling. From a viewport in the admiral's quarters, the two men were watching null-gee construction
crews put the finishing touches on the massive ship's deliberately misleading superstructure.