"E. E. Doc Smith - D' Alembert 9 - The Omicron Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

further into the metropolitan area, there were more piles of rubble to give evidence of the bombardment.
The smell of death became almost overpowering: thousands of bodies left unburied for a week beneath
tons of debris made a nauseating stench that left the five flesh-and-blood members of the group gagging.

"We'd better not stay here too long," Jules choked out. "Dead bodies harbor diseases; we don't
need any additional complications at this stage."

The further they traveled into the city, the more impassable the roads became. Lady A had to slow
their vehicle practically to a crawl to avoid rubble strewn across the street, and sometimes had to
backtrack and take an alternate route when the road ahead was completely blocked. None of them wanted
to get out of the car and investigate the ruins on foot; the stench was too noxious, and it was already
abundantly clear how thorough the invaders' bombardment had been. Any planet falling to their attack
would suffer horrible casualties.

They rode mostly in silence, both out of respect for the dead and in awe of the enemy's power.
One unanswered question hung heavily in their minds: Where were the invaders? Aside from the brief
encounter with that walking tower and the fight with the scout ships when they approached the planet,
there had been no sign of the people who had caused this devastation. What could be their reason for
bombing the life out of a planet's cities and then leaving the ruins untouched? What did the enemy want so
badly that they would go to these horrible lengths to achieve it?

Eventually, having decided they'd seen enough, they drove out of the central city area into the
outlying region of homes again. They were discussing whether to look for a copter and fly to other cities
in their search for the invaders when they heard some far-off sounds. These were the first artificial sounds
they'd heard, other than their own, since crashing on Omicron, and they turned in that direction
immediately. At least it promised something more than the depressing desolation they'd seen so far.

For a while, they couldn't see what was happening, because there were too many buildings still
standing in this part of the town. As they came closer, though, the nature of the sounds became clear. A
battle was going on somewhere in the suburbs. High-powered energy beams were being exchanged and
buildings were crumbling as they took the brunt of the fighting. Encouraged, Lady A accelerated the car
and took off in that direction.

As they rounded a corner, the walking tower came into view once more. Still several blocks away,
it dwarfed the houses and apartment buildings that dominated the neighborhood. Blaster beams sizzled
down from the disk-shaped compartment on the top, aimed at a point out of the team's sight. There seemed
to be some return fire, too, coming up from the ground, but the beams were much paler than the tower's.
Jules guessed they were from handheld blasters or blaster rifles at most—scarcely the sort of firepower
any defenders would need against that tower.

Lady A stopped the car a couple of blocks away from the fighting. "No sense providing them with
too choice a target," she said. "We'll be much more discreet if we walk in from here and see what's going
on."

They climbed hurriedly out of the car and ran toward the scene of the battle. As they approached
within one block, the situation became much clearer.
 The tower had taken a position in the middle of a small park. The defenders were across the street,
in what had been a row of houses. Some of the two-story structures were still standing, while others had
been blasted into rubble which the defenders used for cover. The defenders kept hidden most of the time,
which made it hard to estimate their numbers, but Jules would have guessed there were somewhere