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

Pindar looked at Salvaje. He was ordinary enough. Medium height, hair slicked straight back in
some kind of electrostatic hold, a little beard and mustache. He could have been thirty or fifty; he had
one of those faces that don’t seem to age much. He wore a plain black coverall and flexboots.
Pindar wasn’t sure what a holy man ought to look like, but Salvaje sure wasn’t it.
“There,” Salvaje said, pointing.
Pindar saw the cam on a table. “Damn, where’d you get that antique? It looks like an old
ship’s monitor—”
“Where I got it is not important. Can you use it to tie us into the Nets?”
“Senor, I can tie you into the Nets with a toaster and a couple of microwave cooker circuit
boards. I am a very good technician.”
Salvaje said nothing, only stared at Pindar with those cold gray eyes of his. Pindar repressed a
shudder. Gave him the crawlies when he did that. “Si, I can put you on the air. But visual and
auditory only. No sublims, no subsonics, no olfactories. Be pretty tame compared to what your
competition is throwing at the GU.”
“The Great Unwashed will hear the truth of my message without trickery. And they will see the
image of the True Messiah. Such things will be enough. Behold!”
Salvaje touched a control on an old projector on the table next to him and a hologram
shimmered to life behind him.
“Madre de Dios!” Pindar said softly.
The image was perhaps three meters from the tip of its pointed, spiky tail to the top of its
banana-shaped and grotesque head. If it had eyes, they seemed recessed just behind twin rows of
needle-tipped teeth. Pindar stepped to one side and saw what appeared to be thick external ribs
jutting from the thing’s back, and overall, it looked as if some god playing a joke had created a
manlike thing born of giant insects. The monster was a dull black or dark gray, and Pindar would not
wish to meet such a thing under any circumstances. He didn’t know what the Messiah was supposed
to look like, either, but he would bet all the iron in the Asteroid Belt that this wasn’t it.
 “I can put you on the air in five minutes,” Pindar said, bending to pick up the antique camera.
“Along with your… messiah. It is your money. But I wonder that anyone will look upon this thing
and think it might deliver them, senor. I myself would expect to see it in Hades.”
“Do not blaspheme about that which you do not understand, technician.”
Pindar shrugged. He accessed the camera’s computer, tied it into a shunt, and rigged a relay
transmitter. He moved quickly to the power unit and control console, tapping stolen codes into an
orbiting broadcast satellite. He held off on the last digit, then turned to Salvaje. “When I input the
final number, you will have three minutes before the WCC locks its trace of our signal. Two more
minutes and they will find the dish I hid in Madras, and two minutes after that they will find this place.
Best you hold your transmission to five minutes. I have an automatic cut off thirty seconds after that. I
will have to find another bounce dish if you wish to broadcast again.”
“Esta no importa,” Salvaje said.
Pindar shrugged. “Your money.”
Salvaje reached up, as if to stroke the dreadful image of the hologram floating in the air behind
him. His fingers passed through the image. “Others will have heard the call. I must speak to them.”
Crazy as a shithouse rat, Pindar thought. But of this he did not speak aloud. “All right. In four
seconds. Three. Two. One.” He input the final number.
Salvaje smiled into the camera’s lens. “Good day, fellow seekers. I have come to you with the
Great Truth. The coming of the True Messiah…”
Pindar shook his head. He would sooner worship his dog than this hideous image, which had to
be a computer simulation. Nothing could really look like that.

The patient cafeteria was nearly empty, a dozen or so of the inmates shuffling their drug-calmed
ways through the line with soft plastic trays. Billie moved in her own chemical fog, feeling tired, but