"Jack McKinney - Robotech 01 - Genesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

aside, Zor was spared most of their fury. Still, he'd suffered terrible injuries-skin burned from
his body until bone was exposed, lungs seared by fire, bones broken from the concussion and the
fall, tremendous internal hemorrhaging. He knew he would die.
Before the Invid scout could finish the job, Dolza was there, firing at it with his
disruptor rifle, ordering the remaining pods to concentrate their fire on it. "Zor is down! Save
Zor!" he thundered. Switching to his helmet communicator, he tried to raise his most trusted
subordinate.
"Breetai! Breetai! Where are you?"
The scout was blown to fiery bits in the withering fusillade, but its call had gone out;
the other scouts and the shock troopers were homing in on their archenemy.
Dolza, with the remaining warriors and pods, formed a desperate defensive ring,
unflinchingly ready to die according to their code.
Suddenly there was a massive volley from the right. Then an even more intense one from the
left. To Dolza's astonishment, they were directed at the Invid.
Breetai had arrived at the head of reinforcements. Some of them were wearing only body
armor like himself, but most were in tactical or heavily armed officers' Battlepods. The Invid
line began to collapse before a storm of massed fire. More pods were arriving all the time. Dolza
couldn't understand how-an invasion force was descending by the thousands from a moon-size Invid
hive ship, its troopers as uncountable as insects. Surely the base must be covered by a living,
swarming layer of the enemy.
But the enemy was being driven back, and Breetai was leading a countercharge on foot, just
as a small wedge of shock troopers threatened to make good on a suicide rush at Dolza and Zor. A
disc struck a pod near Breetai even as he was firing left and right with his rifle; blast and
shrapnel hit his head and the right side of his face.
Breetai dropped, skull aflame, but the Zentraedi countercharge went on-somehow-to drive
the Invid back to the breach in the wall.
Finally Dolza wearily lowered his glowing rifle muzzle. Pursuit of the retreating Invid
could be left to the field commanders. He began to take reports from the newcomers, thus learning
the details of the unexpected Zentraedi victory.


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Most of the Invid had been diverted in an attempt to stop or board the dimensional
fortress and had been wiped out. Even now, word of the attack was going back to the Robotech
Masters; a punitive raid would have to be mounted. Breetai was being attended to by the healers
and would live, though he would be scarred for life.
But all of that was of little moment to Dolza. He looked down on the smoking, broken body
of Zor. Healers crowded around the fallen genius with their apparatus and medicines, but Dolza had
seen enough combat casualties to know that Zor was beyond help.

Zor knew it as well as Dolza. Drifting in a near delirium, feeling surprisingly little
pain, he heard exchanges about the dimensional fortress. He smiled to himself, though it hurt his
scorched face, thankful that the starship had escaped.
Once more, he had the Vision that had made him decide to dispatch the ship; as the master
of the limitless power of Protoculture, with his matchless intellect, he had access to hidden
worlds of perception and invisible paths of knowledge.
He saw again an infinitely beautiful, blue-white world floating in space, one blessed with
the treasure that was life. He sensed that it was or would be the crux of transcendent events, the