"Dean Wesley Smith - Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Dean Wesley)

the stars.
The hatch snapped into a horizontal position, be-coming a ramp as she stepped onto it.
She took the flare gun from her belt and aimed it up and away from the ship, then fired.
The orange and white light of the flare lit an incredi-ble black world around her.
She knew it had been called Times Square.
She had seen pictures of this area in its heyday, long before her birth, when the parties celebrating the
New Year would fill this area with millions of people. It had been an area of life, of activity.
Now there was only darkness and ruin. The sight hit her hard, right in the stomach, making her take a
deep breath.
Crumbling buildings loomed over piles of brick, mortar, and rusted old cars. All the glass in all the
win-dows was long gone, leaving the holes as empty, dead eyes, the blackness too deep to even think about.
This was the same kind of destruction she kept seeing in her dreams. Only her dream was of an alien
world; this was reality on her world.
She forced herself back to the task at hand, scanning the area around the ship for any sign of the
Phantoms, lit up by the flare. Nothing.
She pulled out her gun, holding it ready as she moved down the last few meters to the ground. Dust and
debris swirled away from her, caused by the mo-tion of her feet. But even that little wind seemed wrong
and out of place in this much death. She had no idea when the last time a human had been here was. Too
long ago, that was certain.
With one more glance around the flare-lit ruins that
towered over her, she clicked on the scanner over her left eye. The faint beep seemed far louder in the
dead-ness.
The flare died out and Aki fired another, aiming up between two of the tallest buildings. The flare
exploded hundreds of meters above her ship, sending trailers of red and white. Her scanner confirmed no
life-forms in the area, in any of the buildings at any level.
"All right," she said aloud, taking a deep breath as the hatch touched down, She stepped off onto a rough
pile of rubble. "Where are you?"
Her bracelet scanner blinked as she held it up and slowly turned. On the display it read, "No life-form."
Turning degree by degree, she moved around, letting the scanner do its work. Then, as she faced to the
south, the blinking increased and became steady.
"Got you," she said, her voice smothered by the darkness as the flare went out.
She shot another flare into the air to the south and scanned the area to make sure nothing was coming at
her. So far it was still clear. She climbed off the pile of debris, moving down what had once been the center
of a very busy street, climbing over or going around de-bris as she needed to.
Her footsteps were the only sounds. She could tell that what she was looking for was directly ahead,
in-side a building. She kept moving as fast as she dared in all the debris. At the top of one pile her flare was
about to die out again, so she fired another.
This time the eye scanner caught something moving in the distance, down the street, as the flare
exploded overhead.
Her heart seemed to stop as every nerve in her body froze. Suddenly the very dead city was no longer
so dead. Out of open windows and shadows, her eye scanner showed her dozens of Phantoms, climbing
into the street like animals coming from their dens.
She had seen Phantoms up close before. Invisible to the naked human eye, under the special energy
flares they appeared. There were many kinds of Phantoms, but the ones she had just seen seemed grossly
asym-metric creatures, translucent like glowing jellyfish. They had enormous heads and multi-tentacle
arms. In the light of the flare they looked reddish.
They owned this old city.
She glanced back toward where the Black Boa was sitting, a familiar shape in the alien world of this
ruined city. A half dozen of the Phantoms were coming out of holes between her and her ship.
She took a deep breath. She only had one choice, and that was to get the sixth spirit and get out quickly.