"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 31 - Gladiators of Hapanu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

Gladiators of Hapanu
Blade Book 31


By Jeffrey Lord




Chapter 1
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Richard Blade walked alone down the underground corridor two hundred feet below theTowerofLondon
. As he walked he tried to see the corridor as would a man who'd never seen it before and knew nothing
about it.
The floor was large, close-set tile, a bland, neutral brown alternating with an equally bland gray in a
sort of checkerboard pattern. The tile threw up echoes from Blade's footsteps for the walls and ceiling to
catch and bounce back. The floor showed signs of wear from many fast-moving feet, but it was
spotlessly clean. In fact it was not merely clean, it was as antiseptic as the floor of a hospital.
So were the walls. They were not tiled, but something solid covered with pale green semi-gloss paint,
easy on the eyes and easy to wash. At intervals the walls were broken by plain metal doors. All of them
opened by push buttons rather than knobs, and all of them had spy eyes in the middle, so that the people
inside could see anyone waiting outside. The impression the doors gave was less a hospital than a
top-secret military installation. These were doors which might hide the latest guided missile or
experiments with a new and deadly nerve gas.
In other places the walls were broken by metal panels with EMERGENCY stenciled on them in foot
high red letters. There were no conventional fire alarms or fire extinguishers in sight, and it was impossible
to guess what might lurk behind the panels.
Overhead was a ceiling of pale white acoustic tile, broken every few feet by more metal panels,
ventilating grilles, squares of translucent glass or plastic, and sometimes grids of small holes that might
have been made by termites. At intervals a faded discolored line ran across the floor, up one wall, across
the ceiling, and down the wall again. Something once stood across the corridor in these places. Now it
was gone and the corridor stretched unbroken from end to end, more than two hundred feet.
Even without the steady echoes of Blade's footsteps, the corridor wasn't entirely quiet. There was the
distant hum of air-conditioners, the click of typewriters, muffled hints of human voices, and other sounds
that might have been anything. The corridor itself was echoing, empty, and sterile, but there was life and
activity on either side of it.
So much for seeing the corridor through a stranger's eyes. Blade turned off his imagination and
walked faster. He enjoyed these mental exercises, and was good at them. When he'd been atOxford a
teacher said he would make at least a respectable novelist, though probably not a great one.
Blade hadn't become a novelist, but when he'd leftOxford he'd entered a profession where a good
imagination was almost as important. He became a field agent for the secret intelligence agency MI6A. In
fact, he was hand-picked by its chief, the graying man known only as J. J saw a particularly promising
young man, and he was right. Blade became one of the agency's best men, carrying out missions few
others could have handled and surviving dangers that would have killed practically anyone else.
One reason for his success and survival was that imagination of his. More easily than most, he could
put himself into the mind of an enemy, thinking of what the man might do, sometimes before the enemy
thought of it himself: This kind of imagination didn't win him any prizes, but it saved his life a good many
times.
Then a brilliant, eccentric scientist named Lord Leighton conceived the idea of linking a powerful
human mind with an even more powerful computer. He wasn't exactly sure what this would produce, but