"Steve Perry - Aliens 01 - Earth Hive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

still the nightmares came, carrying her on wild and uncontrollable gallops through her nights. The
drugs didn’t help. Counseling, hypnosis, biofeedback, brainwave synthesization, nothing helped.
Nothing could stop the dreams.
He let her up and she moved to the sink to wash her face. The mirror frowned back at her. Her
reflection was medium height, slim and tight from all the compulsive time she spent in the exercise
chair. Her hair, usually cut short, had grown almost to her shoulders, the pale brown of it straight and
nearly ash-colored. Pale blue eyes over a straight nose, a mouth just a hair too big. Not an ugly face,
but nothing to cross the room to get a better look at. Not ugly, but cursed, sure enough. Some god
somewhere must have her in his sights. Billie wished she knew why.

“Buddha, they’re all around us!” Quinn yelled.
Wilks felt the sweat rolling down his spine under the spidersilk armor. The light was too dim,
the helmet lamp didn’t do shit, it was hard to see what was happening around them. The infrared
wasn’t working worth a crap, either. “Shut the fuck up, Quinn! Maintain your field of fire, we’re
gonna be fine!”
“Oh, fuck, Corp, they got the sarge!” That from Jasper, one of the other remaining marines.
There had been twelve of them in the squad. Now there were four. “What are we gonna do?”
Wilks had the little girl in one arm, his carbine in the other hand. The little girl was crying.
“Easy, honey,” he said. “We’re gonna be fine. We’re going back to the ship, everything is gonna be
okay.”
Ellis, bringing up the rear, swore in Swahili. “Oh, man, oh, man, what the hell are these things?”
he said.
It was a rhetorical question. Nobody fucking knew.
The heat pounded at Wilks, the air was cloying, it smelled like something dead left too long in
the sunshine. Where the things had gotten to the walls of the place the flat everlast plastic had been
overlaid with a thick and convoluted blackish-gray substance. It looked like some mad sculptor had
covered the walls with loops of intestine. The twisted coils were as hard as plastecrete, but they put
out warmth, some kind of organic decay, maybe. It was like an oven in here, but wetter.
Behind him, Quinn’s caseless carbine came alive again, the sound of the shots battering Wilks’s
ears with muted echoes.
“Quinn!”
“There’s a shitload of “em behind us, Corp!”
“Shoot for targets,” Wilks ordered. “Triplets only! We don’t have enough ammo to waste on
full auto suppressive fire!”
Ahead the corridor branched, but the pressure doors had come down and sealed both exits. A
flashing light and Klaxon blinked and hooted, and a computer-chip voice kept repeating a warning
that the reactor was approaching meltdown.
They were going to have to cut their way out, fast, or get slaughtered by those things. Or else
fried into radioactive ash. Great fucking choice.
“Jasper, hold the kid.”
“No!” the little girl yelled.
“I gotta open the door,” Wilks said. “Jasper will take care of you.”
The black marine moved in, grabbed the girl. She clutched at him like a baby monkey does its
mother.
Wilks turned to the door. Pulled his plasma cutter from his belt, triggered it. The white-hot jet
of plasma flashed out in a line as long as his forearm. He shoved the cutter against the fail-safe lock,
waved it back and forth. The lock was made of tripolystacked carbon, but it wasn’t designed to
withstand the heat of a star. The carbon annealed, bubbled, and ran like water under the plasma jet.
The door slid up.
One of the monsters stood there. It lunged at Wilks, a long, toothed rod shooting from its open