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

of disgusting stew. Yvette had to be ordered to eat; otherwise her body would have sunk into an apathetic
haze. After dinner she and the others were led into one of the inflated buildings and she was assigned a
sleeping pallet on the floor. Yvette lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling for hours. She was neither
awake nor asleep, but in some private purgatory where thoughts crawled past too slow to catch, too distant
to matter.

Long past midnight the effects of the control ray began wearing off. Sensations and emotions
reached her brain once more, starting with a trickle and rapidly becoming a flood too strong for her to
handle. Yvette Bavol was a strong woman, and proud of her strength. She'd faced what had seemed certain
death a dozen times without blinking an eye. She'd faced capture and torture at enemy hands with not a
whimper or a whine. That was her job, and she was justifiably proud of never having betrayed it.

But this loss of control hit her hardest in that very pride that normally kept her going. Even though
she knew it was no fault of her own, her body had gone over to the enemy without a struggle. She had
been a pawn of the alien invaders, her will totally subjected to theirs. If Jules or Pias or even the Empress
had been in her gunsights and the aliens ordered her to fire, she would have gunned them down without
hesitation. For a woman used to being in control of herself, the humiliation of being a mindless slave was
more than she could bear.

Yvette lay on her pallet sobbing hysterically for two hours before sleep mercifully overcame her.

***

The slaves were awakened at dawn the next day to receive another helping of cold slop. With less
than two hours of solid sleep behind her, Yvette's spirits were even lower than they'd been before. She'd
done plenty of hard work in the past on very little sleep, but the degradation and humiliation of being
under the control ray's influence had a draining effect on her energies. Her muscles were cramped from
the cold night on a hard floor; even standing and waiting in line for food was a major effort. Only by
constantly repeating within her mind who she was and what her mission was on Omicron was she able to
retain any semblance of her former life and alertness. She knew that, given any chance at all, Jules would
come to rescue her; she had to be ready to take advantage of her opportunity when it presented itself.

From the very start, today's activity was different from the previous day's. Yvette and a group of
other captives were separated out from the general run and seated in an open-topped cart, which drove out
of the regular camp. Yvette was very careful to do nothing that would call attention to herself or resemble
defiance in any way; she did not want a second dose of that horrible ray. She was a quick learner, and was
not about to challenge her master's supremacy again—at least not unless there was a good chance of
winning.

The cart drove for a couple of kilometers over some hills along a dirt track that could only be
called a "road" out of courtesy. As they topped one crest, Yvette looked down into the valley below and
let out an involuntary gasp. Nestled there in a peaceful valley, covering dozens of square kilometers, was a
contingent of alien spaceships, perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred, clustered so closely together that Yvette
could not get a clear picture of them all. Their designs were strange, but judging by their size they had to
be Intermediate Class or larger. Of course, the largest ships in any fleet probably couldn't land at all—but
if this was even a significant fraction of the enemy's armada, it was an impressive array.

In the foreground were two more of the inflatable buildings. One was a large structure in its own
right, though dwarfed in comparison to the cluster of ships behind it; the other appeared to be a smaller
storage shed. The transport cart headed down the hill toward the buildings, stopping in front of the larger