"Douglas Hill - The Last Legionary 02 - Deathwing over Veyna" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hill Douglas)

skin. And it fell with a high-pitched howl as its small retro rockets cut in,
slowing its plunge - and at last depositing it with a bump and a slide among
the rocks.
It was a standard escape capsule, in use on many of the spacecraft in the
Inhabited Worlds. It had a tiny power supply, enough for some guidance
control, for its retros and for a continuous "Mayday* broadcast while in
flight. It was a spaceman's last resort when his ship was dangerously
malfunctioning, beyond repair.
The capsule came to rest less than a hundred metres from the watcher. The
great eye observed steadily as a seam opened in the capsule's hull, parting it
into two halves. From within it, as if hatching from an egg, a spacesuited man
emerged.
The man unfastened his helmet and took a deep, grateful breath of the cold
air, then began to peel off the spacesuit, indifferent to the biting wind that
swirled and moaned around him. He was a tall, lean young man with a
strong-boned face, wearing what seemed to be a uniform - dark-
grey tunic and close-fitting trousers tucked into boots. On the cuffs of the
tunic were flashes and stripes of colour, and a sky-blue circlet decorated the
upper chest. The same circlet appeared on the spacesuit helmet, and on the
open and now useless capsule.
The man folded the spacesuit into a manageable bundle with the helmet and
breathing pack, then straightened, studying his surroundings. It was an
uninviting landscape of dark, bare rock, so ridged and creased and corrugated
that, from above, it would look like badly crumpled cloth. Much of the rock
was discoloured with broad smears of a substance that gleamed a sickly blue
under the pale sun.
Yet, for all its dismal appearance, it was a place with an oxygen atmosphere,
able to support human life - even if not comfortably. If the man from the
capsule had been an ordinary spaceman, who had ejected from a crippled ship,
he could have counted himself lucky.
But luck had nothing to do with it. His ship was intact -orbiting in deep
space, under the guidance of the most unusual pilot in the Inhabited Worlds.
And the man from the capsule was no ordinary spaceman.
He was Keill Randor, the sole survivor of a race of people who had once been
the galaxy's most renowned and most supremely skilled fighting force - the
Legions of the planet Moros.
And he had chosen to land as he had done for a purpose - as part of a task he
had to accomplish in this bleak place.
As his gaze swept across his surroundings, he caught a glint of metal deep in
a shadowed deft. He moved closer, warily - and saw the watcher.
And he knew that his task had begun.
The watcher was a robot - a work-robot, he recognized, probably with a limited
programme and no decision faculties. Its body was wide and pyramid-shaped,
with a low centre of gravity to keep it upright on tough terrain. It had six
arms -
10
flexible, whippy tentacles of metal - with tools on their extremities, mining
tools like drills, scoops, pincer-like grabs. Surmounting the body, some two
metres from the ground, was a scanner "eye" - which relayed pictures to
screens that humans would monitor.