"Paul B. Thompson - Magic The Gathering - Masquerade Cycle 02 - Nemesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Paul B)

spreading up his arms. Desperately, the gremlin snagged the
edge of the wrapping. With a tremendous heave of his long
legs, Dabir pulled himself and the bundle back through the
portal. Both landed with a thump on the gritty metal plates
of the Fourth Sphere.
The portal began to dwindle. The wounded agent raised a
hand, either in a final plea or in final salute. Dabir
watched six tall beings surround the fallen figure. They had
spears. Shafts rose and fell in pitiless repetition as the
portal shrank to a few inches, then winked out.
Dabir bobbed up on his knees. He sat in the shadows cast
by the eternal glare of the furnaces, biting his own hands
to restore feeling to them. His normally glossy black skin
had turned ash gray on those parts of his body he'd stuck
through the portal. The numbness slowly faded, but his color
did not return.
A whiff of something delectable teased his formidable
nose. Inserting it in a hole in the tattered blanket, he
sniffed. The ugly white thing inside smelled like the air on
the other side of the portal. No oil, no soot, no tang of
acid aerosols ... he replaced his nose with his tongue and
gave the sample a quick lick. Flesh, newly dead and still
sweet. The Phyrexian agent had died to deliver a corpse.
Dabir delivered the body to Monitor 8391 as ordered and
departed to other tasks. Monitor 8391 ran a laboratory for
the analysis of organic specimens. The Monitor put the
slender corpse on his examining table. A chemical spray
removed the creature's hair. The Phyrexian precisely
measured every critical dimension of the body with calipers,
then carefully laid a square of flowsheet over the corpse's
head. At the Monitor's command, the tiny machines in the
flowsheet crawled over the cold skin, conforming themselves
to every contour. When they were done, he had a perfect mold
of the dead girl's face.
Monitor 8391 passed on the corpse to the Necrometric
Unit 725 for further processing. Body fluids were drained.
The blood was contaminated by poison and therefore useless.
A substitute would have to be used. The flesh was carefully
stripped off and sent to culture vats so the corpse's
tissues could be preserved for eventual reuse. The
sterilized, polished bones were sent back to the Monitor,
who applied his meticulous skills to them once more,
measuring them to the finest calibration of his instruments.
These figures were forwarded to the engine controlling the
mighty apparatus of Processing Mill 44.
The rollers and stamping presses of the factory began to
churn. Bars of duralumin and steel were fed into the
machinery, which formed a hard, metal skeleton identical to
the one measured by the Monitor. Each bone was copied, right
down to the individual metacarpals of the hands and