"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 2 - The Run to Chaos Keep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
They could see the scene now: these cold, pragmatic, utterly materialistic scientists with their faith firmly rooted in what could be seen, felt, touched, and demonstrated, excited by the discovery of what must have been a burial place, intact, for what might have been the galaxy's earliest space-faring civilization. They had poked, probed, scanned, and done everything they could for weeks, probably months, to learn what they could before physically attempting to disturb or remove the remains, just in case exposure to air or light might cause damage or deterioration.
Finally, though, they had all they could from their instruments, their data filling those recording cubes and probably being beamed back to the highest levels of the Exchange. Finally, there came the point where they could do no more without physically extracting the bodies from whatever sarcophagi they lay in.
And the sleepers had awakened and wreaked horrible vengeance on those who had defiled their tomb and disturbed their sleep.
"I almost hesitate to ask this," Gun Roh Chin said at last, his throat curiously and almost painfully dry, "because I'm not sure I want to know the answer, but it must be asked."
"Yes?" Morok responded, watching in added horror as a second scan was being dispassionately discussed on the tape.
"They were suspended, not dead. They were freed, awakened, whatever. They came out and they killed all these people and somehow also fried the ship up there. Then what?"
"Uh? What do you mean?"
"Where did they go next?"
At that moment there came a roaring noise from outside, and in their current mental shape all weapons snapped to ready and they ran out, leaving the recording playing.
Near both the research shuttle and then- own, they could see another, differently designed shuttle landing.
"The Mycohl!" Chin swore. "I'd forgotten about them! Just what we really needed right now!"
"Weapons, everyone!" Krisha snapped, pulling her pistol. She looked around. "Captain -- could our own people play that cube?"
"Uh -- yes, I suppose so. If we can break diplomatic codes I see no reason why we couldn't view a standard cube. The machine can be purchased almost anywhere in the Exchange."
"Then take the cube and any other that might look related. Don't take too long! Manya -- you are best equipped to check out our visitors. Go, but no shooting! Do not betray yourself. Let them go past you and wait until we attack. We might catch them all in a crossfire. Practice the telepathic shielding and in the name of the gods keep your emotions in check!"
The Gnoll was still horribly shaken by the sight on the viewer, but she was a professional, and her horror at the sight of a real demon was no greater than her hatred of the Mycohl. She also had a rather unique Talent of her own. It would be quite effective -- if she could use her training to block out those of the enemy with other Talents that might betray her.
"There's too many to carry," the captain told Krisha. "The three I've picked, including the one we viewed, will have to do."
She nodded. "Stand back, then." She aimed her energy pistol at the entire library, including the machine, and fired. There was a crackling sound, and what the beam did not disintegrate it melted into unusable form. "Let them get any information out of that\" she sniffed.
She stiffened. "We are being telepathically scanned," she told them.
That meant nothing to Chin, who was a null, the oddest and rarest of Talents. Although possessing no Talent of his own, he was immune to those of any other, something not true even of his powerful comrades. He was equally immune to Krisha's telepathy, to Savin's empathic abilities, and even to Morok's powerful hypnotic abilities. Even Manya could not fool him, although her own Talent was unique to her species. Still, if Morok's mind were read, or Manya's, a Mycohl telepath would know he was here just as surely as if he were in full view.
Krisha's telepathic shields were automatically up. That didn't mean that someone of reasonable skill and power and the same Talent couldn't detect her presence, but it certainly meant that they could get nothing from her mind. Morok, Savin, and Manya had fallen back into the somewhat effective methods of chanting prayers, a technique that, with their practice and experience and Krisha's coaching, also left an enemy telepath not completely in the dark, but with far less information than would be useful. Telepathy, like any other form of communication, had its limits. Among them was its lack of directionality, which could be maintained by a practiced opponent varying amplitude as the mind-reader moved toward or away from them.
Still, if a telepath were good enough, and supported by others to gain the missing information, there was no real hiding. In case the Mycohlian was that good, Krisha was prepared to engage her counterpart mind-to-mind.
Morok's thin, clawed, four-fingered hand, so tiny in such a large creature, touched her-shoulder, and she turned and looked up and into his strange, blood-red round eyes.
"You are the sword of the Arm," Morok told her softly. "So long as that sword is needed, you are but an extension of the whole, a tool of the gods, and Krisha neither exists nor is relevant. There is nothing else; you exist only to protect the whole. No other telepath may defeat you, no hypno bind you."
"They are sending someone named Desreth to find us," Krisha reported. "I get no clear image of who or what it is from their minds and nothing from this other at all. Whatever it is, it is a null. They are not taking nearly the precautions to block themselves, but are blocked where it counts. Two Terrans, a male and a female, the former their leader and I presume a hypno. The telepath is a race I do not know but seems large and very grotesque to me. It sees differently than we and depends on other senses more, but thinks in a standard linear pattern. The other is another unfamiliar race and more dangerous, because it can think fully in a form my inadequate mind cannot sort, nor does it see as we see. I can get only occasional flashes of anything close to normal. The null -- somehow they have blocked it out."
Manya had circled around from the main building to a point
where she could view both the newcomers and the building which held her comrades. The Mycohl leader was a tall Terran male dressed in the rust-red color of his Empire, tough and muscular, big without any fat, his muscles showing admirably through his skintight suit. He had a cold arrogance that unnerved her; the manner that she had seen before only in "wild" hypnos, whose power over others deluded them into a sense of near godlike ego.
The second was a strange Terran female, also quite muscular, medium height, with the cold yet subtle moves of a jungle animal. There was something, too, wrong with her face; at first Manya had thought that the woman was just superficially Terran and was actually some other race. Now she realized that the Mycohlian woman might once have been a beauty, but her face was twisted and scarred. With the Gnoll's inability to appreciate the real differences in Terrans without careful study, she thought that this woman somehow resembled Krisha in the essentials -- a dark, evil Krisha, a poisonous distillation of all that was sinful in a young woman's soul.
The third member of the red-clad team was a large creature with a glistening, undulating black body, supported on six impossibly thin legs that appeared to terminate in soft pincers, its face a set of ugly mandibles and large, oval yellow and brown segmented eyes on short, independent stalks. The fourth, about the size of the third, was mostly encased in a gnarled, spiral-like shell of dirty beige, covered with a mass of writhing, thick hairs that seemed to act like tentacles -- thousands of tentacles!
But the fifth -- it was the one that struck some terror into her. It alone wore no environment suit, nor did it need one. Essentially a metallic cube, gunmetal gray with occasional streaks of dull bronze, supported on six long, pointed legs, it appeared to shift its shape in some kind of fluid manner as needed. She knew that sort, all right -- Corithian! Machine-like, artificially created life of some long-gone civilization, able to change itself into whatever was required or ooze out whatever appendage it needed, it had not only the ancestry of a machine but the soul and morals of one, too. By the time the concentrated full-power firing of the rest of the team's guns had immobilized it, the rest of-that crew of evil would have them!
Instinctively she knew she had to betray herself, at least a little, to give warning. Her mouthpiece was live, and, into it, she said, simply, "Corithian coming!"
The strange, shelled creature with the countless hair-like tentacles suddenly whirled as if on a single wheel, and two stalked eyes suddenly seemed to grow out of the shell and look in her direction. Obviously this one was the telepath.
"Behind us!" it rasped aloud, in an eerie voice that seemed to send chills through Manya. "Female, can't get more of a fix with that prayer screen. She just warned her congregation of Desreth, though, by radio."
The leader stopped, turned, and stared back into the jungle. "Can you see her?"
"No, and I cannot understand why I cannot," the telepath responded.
The leader chuckled dryly. "Maybe it's a vegetable. Spray the entire area, full sweep. We might get lucky."
Manya didn't wait. She opened up on the large creature using her own weapon on wide spread and started moving. Betraying her gnome-like, almost hunchbacked appearance and bulk, Gnolls could move pretty fast when they had to.
The attack caused the Mycohlian team to flatten, and by the time they opened fire, Manya had managed to move around all the way to the parked shuttles. The Mycohl, Manya had seen, had made a major sloppy mistake in landing closest to the camp and leaving their shuttle door open. If they fired in any sort of lethal concentration where they knew she should be, they might just blow the inside of their own craft.
The leader stood, fury clear on his face. "Kalia! Get that creature!" he snapped at the woman. "Tobrush -- cover her! If a telepath and an empath can't root that creature out, we don't deserve to be here!" He turned to the insectoid creature. "Robakuk -- you keep those doors sealed! I'm moving up to go in behind Desreth. Join me as soon as you secure our backs. Let us do this quickly! We are in enemy territory without authority -- but so are they. It will be easier to explain this if we alone are left to testify!"
It had taken more guts than sense to get the Mycohl to this point.
They were a new crew, fresh from training and testing, out in a little ship in the middle of nowhere, performing routine picket duty. All of them understood that they were on probation; all also understood that the alternatives to performing well and impressing their superiors were worse than death in the harsh, Darwinian system of the Mycohl.
There was Josef, their big, handsome Terran captain, sporting his traditional ensign's big black mustache, absolute monarch of a flea-speck of a picket ship and subordinate to just about everyone else, his swagger reinforced by his inborn talent as a hypno that had solved many problems on his way to even this point, and who, because of that fact, was yet to be tested in a situation where that power was not a deciding factor.
Here was Kalia, whom he'd met while working on an undercover mission to salvage the great feast and carnival of his Lord Squazos from sabotage by jealous rivals. Kalia, who had risen from the bottom, the lowest drol classes of her hive, with an intelligence born of experience, not formal education, determined to show that she was even more ruthless and deadly than any man, her body a finely tuned mass of muscles that most men could only dream of, her once-beautiful face disfigured by a horrible scar gained in that harsh growing-up that she refused to have removed. Josefs sergeant and as much a weapon as any on the picket ship under his command, she was a powerful empath. She was also illiterate and ignorant of almost anything not directly related to her job, but at that job she was superb.
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