"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 2 - The Run to Chaos Keep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

"More likely the object under study," Morok guessed. "Is it the odd light or my eyes, or does that -- thing -- seem slightly different almost as if it moved?"'
"I have been plotting it" Manya reported. "It does change, somehow. Not really in mass or even dimensions, but subtly, in detail."
"Could it be alive?"
' 'It might be -- but if it is, it is like nothing we know as life in any form. I simply do not know what it is, and I suspect that they didn't either. That is why they are here."
"The base station has normal power," Chin noted. "Looks rather cozy, in fact. But we're not being scanned by anything I can detect. It's as if everybody down mere is asleep. Ah -- see! Then- shuttle's there, in that clearing. I think I can put down close to it. No use in sneaking up. If any thing's left alive down here, it certainly knows we're here by now and should come out and welcome us with open arms."
There was no welcoming committee. They put on their helmets, pressurized, and went out even though all the instrumentation said that the air was perfectly safe and the temperature was quite pleasant. Until they knew more, none of them wanted to take anything for granted.
"Dead like the ship," Krisha said. "Nothing. I get nothing at all. Savin?"
"The same, although I do get some very odd intermittent sensations from the area of that object there. I can't really explain the sensation. It's not like anything I have ever
experienced before. Whatever it is, I do not think it is directed at us."
"That will have to do for now," Morok told him. "Check out their shuttle first, then the prefabs, one at a time. Use caution, keep weapons drawn."
Gun Roh Chin took the shuttle. It wasn't difficult to enter, and, inside, he found it rather bizarrely arranged but nothing he could not have figured out. It was clearly not designed to be flown by humans, although there were two human-shaped seats in the rear. The rest he put down to different designs and a different shuttle design philosophy. Still, he could tell almost from the moment he entered that it was powered, fully charged, and could be operational with a few flicks of a few switches.
"Shuttle is perfect and operational," he reported through his helmet radio.
"Then it could have picked up our survivor," Morok came back.
"Unlikely. Without power up there, they'd have had to cut away the outer airlock faceplate to get to the manual controls. They didn't. This thing was here before and it's been here all the time."
"The square prefab! Come quickly!" Krisha shouted.
They were all there on the run as soon as they got their bearings, piling into the door and then stopping dead just inside.
"May the gods embrace their innocent souls and reincarnate them to a life of peace," Morok intoned.
Gun Roh Chin was not prayerful. Even protected from the stench by his suit, he still wanted to throw up.
Savin bent down over a bloody form. "Krisha, exobiology is not my strong point, but isn't the human heart mounted roughly in the central chest cavity?"
Krisha swallowed hard. "Yes, roughly. What . . . ?"
The huge Mesok grabbed a shock of white hair atop the head of a Terran corpse, its face locked in a horrible and grotesque death mask, and yanked it up unceremoniously so that the chest was exposed.
The central area of the chest had been literally torn open, as if by some wild creature, possibly, even probably, while the man had been still alive. They all caught their breaths, but Manya scurried over and began using her portable instruments
to examine the awful-looking wound. Even the tough, fanatical Gnoll seemed a bit shaky, though.
"It ... has been torn from his chest," she managed. "Several of the others have equivalent mutilations. Something with great strength just pushed them down, like a child's plaything, and either ripped or tore key organs out of them."
"How long have they been dead?" Morok asked her.
"Seven days at least. This happened at least seven days ago. The bodies are dried up and beginning decomposition."
Gun Roh Chin wanted to avoid the sight of the research party, its nice little lab smeared in red human blood, and Zalerian green, and gray, and purple, and other colors of other races who had been here. He walked over to the far side of the lab and began to examine a huge hole that had seemingly been smashed into the wall around what had once been a window. He pushed away where the debris had bent inward and looked out at the strange, slightly changing, translucent structure just beyond.
In the small administration hut there was much the same, only here the door had simply been kicked or blown in. Here, too, were apparently several armed security officers, and this apparently had been, along with a couple found outside, the only armed members of the party. Some had clearly gotten off a lot of shots, and they looked, even in their present condition, to be the kind who didn't miss.
Whatever had come out of that thing and killed them was hardly subtle; it had just come, on and on, oblivious to anything that they could do.
He had been around, seen hundreds of worlds and races, seen violence and cruelty as well as gentleness and good, but he had never seen anything like this.
"Something big," Kelly Morgan had told him. Something perhaps too big, even for them.
Krisha called to him. "Captain, I hate to ask, but I need you. We've found the depository recordings and none of us can read the writing to tell which is which."
He returned to the ultimate horror scene, noting how peaceful and gentle this place was, how quiet, and re-entered the lab.
He scanned the cabinet full of small labeled cubes she'd found, then picked one out. "This is a good place to start," he told her. "It says 'Preliminary Report on Remote Autopsy of Unknown Forms.""
"There's a player in the office over there," she told him. "And no bodies. The recording system is different than ours. , I'm not certain I know how to work it."
He took it, went into the office, which looked as if it had just been left for a moment by its occupant, then found the small previewer machine. "It's not difficult," he told her. "It's just that instead of the full-blown presentation we get a small representation on the viewer plate, there. Switch your suit to translate standard Exchange."
The power was on; he simply turned on the machine, inserted the cube label side out, and pressed the large actuator touch switch.
Much of it was simply a dictated interim report to some superiors back home, probably a record copy, but the small, three-dimensional images it projected of the research materials told them something.
"Subject A is a male of the species, 2.4381 meters tall, weight estimated at two hundred forty to two hundred sixty-eight kilograms. It won't be possible to totally eliminate the material in which they are embedded without extraction from the estimations. Sorry. The main body surface area is very tough, very dense. The skin is at least 1.2 centimeters thick, more aptly described as a 'hide' than mere skin, and various vital areas seem further protected by bony plates at or very near the exterior. Both hands and feet are overly large in proportion to the body and are hairless, with that mottled texture consistent and the palms probably rock hard to the touch although they certainly bend and flex in the expected manner. The talons at the ends of the fingers are suited to ripping and tearing flesh, consistent with the teeth, which contain no herbivorous molars at all. They are true flesh-eating carnivores, no question."
"By the gods," Krisha intoned under her breath as the long-dead voice went on. "I am looking at the scans but they mean little to me."
"Or me," Chin agreed. "Manya?"
The Gnoll seemed to be trembling visibly, her eyes rapt on the small viewing plate, intoning prayer after prayer.
Krisha looked somewhat stricken herself and looked up at Chin. "Her mind keeps saying 'Demons! Demons! They have awakened Hell personified.'"
"Manya!" Morok shouted at her.
The science officer seemed not to notice, men pointed a gnarled finger at the projection. "There! The full scan! Now they will pull back and restore it!"
The tiny figure, still a computerized diagram, now showed a full figure. Humanoid, big -- bigger than Savin by a head -- and, slowly, more and more detail was overlain as the voice continued to drone on with its observations.
"Oh, gods of eternity protect us!" Savin prayed. "Manya is right. Look! Look!"
Gun Roh Chin had to admit that even the hair on the back of his own neck seemed to be tingling as he saw what they had found.
The creature didn't look quite the way his own religious teachers had pictured them, but it was still clearly recognizable, from the small horns on its head to the dull red eyes, fanged mouth, even the cloven hooves.
There could be no question in his or anyone else's mind that he and they were looking at -- not a representation, not an abstract estimation, and not someone's imagination, but a real, three-dimensional photograph of an actual, in the flesh, classical demon.