"Viktor Koman - Captain Anger 1 - The Microbotic Menace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koman Victor)

billowing fog that permeated the room.
Inside the chamber she could see nothing but darkness and a faint
flicker of orange flame. Aiming for that, she continued to blast away. She
used up the breath she took before entering and dropped the extinguisher
with a loud clank to reach for the still-smoldering form ahead of her. Its
own arms extended, the hellish figure staggered toward her, pushing her
to the exit.
They burst from the chamber into the marginally fresher air, Weir first,
the other second. In the light of the control room, he made for a
monstrous vision indeed.
Burnt black all over, the suit he wore consisted of a knobby assemblage
of spheres, half-spheres, and short cylinders designed in such a way as to
provide freedom of movement in all possible angles of rotation that the
human body could achieve. A thick layer of char encrusted the spherical
helmet.
Leila dropped to her knees, savoring the fresh air nearer the floor.
Clumsily, and with the unsteady creak of roasted rotational surfaces, the
suited man eased down to a similar position, struggling to undo his
helmet. Weir reached up to help him and after a moment, the sphere
rotated counter-clockwise one quarter turn. With a slight pop, it came
loose. They lifted it off and stared at each other.
“Safety note,” the man said in a gravelly voice that grated his English
through a Russian sieve. “Cavorite Mark Two is flammable under high
positron flux.”
“Yes,” Weir said, sitting on the floor inspecting the helmet. “But it
works.”
She rose to walk over to the console. Flipping a few switches activated
the smoke blowers. With a whine, they sucked the cloud of blackish-grey
haze out through the air-conditioning vents and into the pollution
scrubber. There, a series of traps and increasingly finer filters removed
every particle of pollutant and molecule of unnatural gas before recycling
the purified air into the building. The chemicals and elements trapped in
the system accumulated in an array of catalytic converters where an
ingenious collection of molecules built toxins into more useful chemicals,
or stripped them down to their component elements for future use. The
system, powered by the huge solar array outside, operated almost without
human attention, guided by the silent decision-making of a portion of the
mighty parallel processing computer housed in the complex.
The man in the blackened suit stood and stretched. The flame-singed
metal joints creaked with each movement. He disassembled the outfit,
beginning with the knobby gloves. He was short, stocky, and powerfully
built. He looked not unlike a sumo wrestler—trimmer, though, and more
obviously muscled. His skin was deeply tanned, the flesh of his face
roughened by years in sun that shone over all parts of the world, from
steaming tropics to arid deserts to the frigid polar antipodes. His eyes,
buried in a perpetual frown, were black as pools of crude oil, a color that
matched his crop of hair. Almost as an anachronism, his hair lay straight
back on his head, slicked down by hair oil until it resembled a shiny
lacquer skullcap.
Clad in nothing but a pair of bright orange Kevlar boating trunks, Pete