"Jack McKinney - Sentinels 01 - Devils Hand" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinney Jack)

beauty filling the view. Sunlight glinted off the alloyed hulls and fins of dozens of in-transit shuttles. Rick
was staring down at the planet wistfully.

"When's Lisa due back?" Max asked him.

"Tomorrow. But I'm thinking of shuttling down to meet her."

Max made an approving sound. "I'll ride with you."

"When haven't you," Rick said, after a moment.

With the destruction of the SDFs 1 and 2 on that fateful winter night in 2014, Macross's sister city,
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




Monument, had risen to the fore as Earth's unofficial capital. The irradiated remains of Macross had been
bulldozed flat and pushed into what hadn't been boiled away from Lake Gloval. Three enormous
manmade buttes marked the resting place of the superdimensional fortresses, along with that of the
Zentraedi cruiser that had destroyed them. But those mounds had not been completed before volunteer
teams of valiant Robotechnicians had braved slow death to salvage what they could from the devastation.

Thrice-born Macross, however, was not resurrected, as much by choice as anything else; but the name
lived on in a kind of mythic way, and Monument City, to the southwest over a rugged ridge, was doing its
best to carry the tradition forward. This would change after the SDF-3 departed, but in 2020 things were
much as they were in the Macross of 2014. That is not to say that there weren't sinister currents in the air
for one and all to perceive; but the Expeditionary mission to Tirol was foremost on the minds of those
who could have prevented the subsequent slide.

Monument was the seat of the United Earth Government, but the most important building in that
burgeoning city was the headquarters of the newly-formed Army of the Southern Cross, a
politico-military party that had its origins in the Southlands during the Malcontent Uprisings, and had all
but superseded the authority formerly enjoyed by RDF, most of which was slated for the Expeditionary
mission. The headquarters was a soaring megacomplex whose central tower cluster had been built to
suggest the white gonfalons, or ensigns, of a holy crusade hanging from high crosspieces. The high-tech
needles were crowned with crenels and merlons, like some medieval battlement, announcing to all the
world the ideals and esprit of the Army of the Southern Cross.

Just now the building was host to a final press conference held jointly by members of the Expeditionary
Mission Plenipotentiary Council, the RDF, and the Southern Cross. Dr. Emil Lang and the Zentraedi
Ambassador, Exedore, spoke on behalf of the twelve-person council, while the military factions were
represented respectively by Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt and Field Marshal Anatole Leonard.
The press was there in force, crowding the hall, jostling one another for position, snapping off shot after
stroboscopic shot, and grilling the four-member panel with an overwhelming array of questions from
special-interest groups and insulated power bases as distant as Cavern City and Brasilia in the
Southlands.

Lang was doing his best to respond to one of these; for the third time, someone in the press corps had
returned to the issue of Earth's potential vulnerability in the wake of the SDF-3's departure. As the high