"Smith, E E Doc - D'alembert 09 - Omicron Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

The ground would not stay empty for long, though. Over to her right, beyond the inflated buildings, Yvette could see a more permanent structure rising. It was still too incomplete to show any final details of its form, but it did look strange to her sophisticated eye.
That one quick glance was all she was permitted at the moment. The alien with the gun barked another order, and all eyes in the group trained on him. He pointed in the direction of one mylar building, leaving little doubt in anyone's mind they were supposed to move that way. Yvette walked along with the rest of them; this was neither the time nor the place to challenge someone with a blaster.
As her head began clearing from the yellow smoke's aftereffects, she took stock of her personal situation. The aliens had taken away her blaster, yet had left almost everything else intact. Her utility belt was still around her waist, and most of its compartments-including the ones with the minigrenades-appeared untouched. Even the four knives she'd brought with her were still strapped securely to her wrists and inside her boots. With this equipment and her own native abilities, she could put up a fight against some pretty strong opposition.
She was surprised and more than a little puzzled. Either her captors were terribly careless or else they showed a remarkable lack of concern about how much resistance could be offered.
The captives were lined up single file in front of a table. Each in turn had to kneel while one of the aliens placed a slim metal collar around his neck. It was a simple and streamlined procedure, and the line moved quickly until it came to Yvette's turn.
The DesPlainian looked the situation over. One of the aliens was seated at the table, placing the neckbands on humans. Two armed aliens stood behind the table watching the crowd and prepared for trouble. There were more of the aliens scattered around within a hundred meter radius, all armed with strange but impressive-looking weapons.
Yvette knew she could kill the three aliens at the table with a few quick movements, but where would that leave her? There were more who would instantly draw their weapons. Even if she could avoid all of them, she had no place to go. The area had been worked flat, offering little cover to a fugitive. She had no idea where on Omicron she was, or how she could rejoin her brother. She would be on foot, fleeing a ruthless enemy whose sneak attack had savagely killed millions of innocent people. A few seconds of defiance would lead to an early grave.
Besides, she had come to Omicron to find the invaders and learn what they were up to. Now that she'd achieved the first objective, it would be a waste of a good opportunity to run away. Even if she wasn't in the best position to learn everything she wanted, she was alive and in the middle of an enemy base of some sort. That gave her something to work with.
With only the slightest of hesitations, Yvette knelt before the table. The alien seated there leaned forward and placed one of the thin metal collars around her neck. The being's skin felt cool and somewhat greasy against her own, and she had to brace herself not to flinch. The collar clicked into place around her neck, loose enough for her to slip two fingers' width between it and her throat. It would allow her to breathe and swallow, but she couldn't pull it off over her head.
The ceremony over, Yvette rose and went to stand with the other newly banded humans, more questions than ever swirling about in her head. What did the band mean? Did it do anything? If the invaders just came last week, how did they manage to build up such a big supply of the bands so quickly? Did that mean they'd been preparing for this invasion for a long time, unbeknownst to the Empire? Of course, the way the attack had been carried out showed they'd scouted Omicron pretty thoroughly-but how had they done it without making their presence known to the humans?
There were more questions than easily available answers, so Yvette just stood silently with the group, waiting for the remainder of her fellow captives to receive their collars.
When that was accomplished, the prisoners were herded off again in another direction, this time to a lumberyard's worth of boards and timber. A few brisk gestures from the overseer made it clear their task would be to carry the lumber from its present location to where it was needed for building. It was a mindless and simple enough task, and Yvette fell to it enthusiastically, hoping the physical exertion would help rid her body of the last of the poisons from the yellow smoke so she could be fresh to confront her new situation.
An older woman in the group, though, was not up to such strenuous activity. She looked to be in her late fifties, and appeared to have some problem with her legs. She was carrying one end of a heavy load of boards across the compound when her legs gave out and she crumpled to the ground. The lumber she'd been carrying went down with her, scattering across the dirt.
The overseer was beside her immediately, exhorting her to get up, but the woman merely cried with the pain. Angrily the alien grabbed her by the arms and yanked her to her feet, which only collapsed under her again more painfully. The woman was sobbing hysterically, and work stopped around her as the prisoners stood by and watched the drama, waiting to see what would happen next.
Waiting, though, was not Yvette's style. Even though it meant some risk to herself, her instincts would not let her be a mute witness as some innocent woman was beaten and abused. Putting down her own load, she walked quickly to the side of the fallen woman. "It'll be smooth, gospozha," she whispered gently in the woman's ear. "I'll help you up."
She felt a hand on her shoulder as the overseer moved to push her away. Yvette looked angrily up into that green, alien face. "I'm just helping her do her job, no thanks to you. She'll be smooth if you leave her alone."
If the alien understood, he gave no indication of it. Instead he pushed Yvette away from the woman's body, hard enough to knock the DesPlainian to the ground herself. Yvette was a bit surprised-these little fellows were stronger than they looked. Getting back on her feet, she returned to where the overseer had started beating the fallen woman, then grabbed his arm and pushed him over backwards the same way he'd pushed her.
Out of the corner of her eye, Yvette could see a few of the alien guards converging on the spot. The last thing she'd wanted was real trouble, where they were armed and she wasn't; even with her knives, she could scarcely hope to survive such an encounter. She quickly helped the woman to her feet again and turned to face the approaching overseers with her hands spread apart from her body in what she hoped would be interpreted as a gesture of submission.
"I don't want to give you mokoes a hard time," she said in a soothing tone. "I was just helping a lady stand up. See, I'll get back in line now and everything will be smooth. No need to fire those big, nasty guns."
If the aliens understood Empirese they gave no indication of it. Despite her soothing tone and verbal assurances, Yvette saw one of the creatures reach to his side and start to pull out an object. It was a tubular device with a handle, looking for all the world like a weapon. Although alien expressions could conceivably be different, the look on his face convinced Yvette he was going to use the device on her.
The moment for calm obeisance had passed. With her life on the line anyway, Yvette threw caution to the winds and went in to a full self-defense mode. Rather than backing away from the fight, she ran full speed at the alien who'd begun drawing his weapon. A high, well-placed kick sent the device flying from his hand. Spinning on the ball of her right foot, she came around and walloped the creature on the side of the head, knocking him to the ground. Her momentum continued to spin her around until she planted her left foot again. She was in a crouch facing two more aliens, prepared for further action.
She was not prepared, however, for what happened next. Her skirmish with the first alien, even though it had lasted just a few seconds, had given the others time to draw their own tube devices. Yvette found herself staring down two separate barrels. She tensed to spring to her right, but even her DesPlainian reflexes weren't quick enough.
Rays of energy streamed forth from the barrels of both guns, bathing the young woman in a pale yellow glow. Prepared for the searing intensity of blaster beams, Yvette's whole body tensed and a final, silent prayer flashed through her mind. These weapons were not blasters, though, and the effect of the rays was far more subtle-and in some ways, more frightening.
To Yvette, the whole world suddenly seemed detached and very far away. Her sensory apparatus was undamaged, and impulses reached her brain in the normal way, but they seemed to belong to someone else, and scarcely mattered to her at all. It was as though her will had turned to jelly and her mind to mush. She, Yvette Bavol, became a disembodied entity floating beyond the trivial concerns of her corporal form.
Somewhere, buried deep within the foam padding that seemed to surround her mind, an intellectual part of her was screaming in horror. As a finely trained athlete, Yvette was used to having her mind and body function in perfect coordination; her merest thought would be instantly converted into action when she willed it so. Suddenly, her will was cut off from her body, drifting in a limbo apart. She was there, yet she wasn't, entombed in a nightmare of living hell.
The fight stopped instantly as Yvette's body stood silently in place, waiting for guidance. One of the overseers took her firmly by the arm and led her back to where she'd dropped her own load of lumber. He gestured for her to bend down and pick it up, and obediently she did so. It was all the same to her whether she stood or worked. More commands were given, and Yvette carried them out as instructed.
Deeply buried, the inner Yvette was horrified that her body would betray her this badly. She'd heard descriptions of what it was like to be under nitrobarb, and this detached feeling sounded similar. This part of her mind fought strongly against the effects of the control ray, like a bird beating hopelessly against the bars of its cage, but it was no use. A sweat broke out on her forehead from the magnitude of the internal struggle, but she could not make her body obey her. For better or worse, her will was enslaved to the whim of her alien masters.
She spent the rest of the day performing menial tasks that required little thought or coordination. After sundown, she and the other captives were escorted to a mess area where they were served some kind 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 one. The overseers had the humans hop quickly off the cart and march single file into the building.
Alien though these invaders may have been, certain functions do not change. Yvette could tell from the moment she walked in the door that this building was a military headquarters of some sort. The interior was partitioned off into a series of cubicles, and aliens wearing stylized uniforms of different colors were walking officiously to and fro.
There were surprisingly few of the invaders on staff in here; perhaps they had most of their work computerized, or perhaps most of the officers were supervising construction at the slave camp. Whatever the reason, this military office was ridiculously understaffed. Yvette contemplated silently how easy it would be to break in here and get whatever information was available-provided she could recognize the important information when she saw it. Right now, only Tatiana had the potential to read the alien symbols-and Yvette had no idea where the albino woman was, or even if she was still alive.
Throughout the day, Yvette and the other humans were made to fetch and tote supplies from the storage shed into the main building and up and down the central corridor of the headquarters, in and out of the various cubicles, until she knew pretty thoroughly where everything was in here. What she didn't know was how to make use of that knowledge, or how to get anything out of here if she should acquire it.
Nevertheless, as the cart drove back to the slave camp at the end of a hard day's work, Yvette was starting to feel more positive about herself and her mission once more. Despite the setbacks that had overtaken her she'd still managed to discover a key point in the aliens' defenses. There was little she could do except keep her eyes open and wait. Everything now would depend on how well Jules and the other team members managed on their own. But if they came for her, Yvette vowed she was going to be ready. She had a personal score to settle with these green-skinned invaders.
CHAPTER 9
Freedom Raid
Realizing they had a lot of distance to cover to reach the slave camp and alien base, the Empire team spent some time looking around for a different mode of transportation. The groundcar, while comfortable, was entirely too slow and too limited to serve as a reconnaissance vehicle. After a short search they found something more to their purpose: a copterbus trapped in the ruins of an old storage shed. It may have been a part of the city's public transport system, judging from the insignia on its sides, but it had been in the shop for repairs when the aliens began their bombardment and had been overlooked in the ensuing chaos. Fortier and Ivanov, having the most complete knowledge of these devices, examined the vehicle carefully and pronounced it nearly fit to fly. A couple hours' work was all they needed to get it into working order again, and the team was off on its mission into the heart of alien territory.
Even at the copter's top speed the journey was several hours long and the five team members spent that time looking nervously out the windows on all sides, alert for any sign of enemy activity. They remembered how quickly the aliens had spotted the H-16 when it was orbiting Omicron and they wanted to be prepared to defend themselves if they should be spotted again.
About halfway along the route to where their maps said the Long River valley was, they flew over a large town that had survived the bombing intact. On impulse Jules ordered that they stop here and pick up some supplies. "We don't know what we'll be facing when we get there, and I'd like to be prepared for any trouble," he reasoned, and Lady A agreed with him.
They found some food that hadn't been ransacked by marauders fleeing to the countryside, but just as importantly they came across a construction supply company. The company stocked explosives, detonators and fuses, and the team greedily loaded themselves up on those commodities. Facing an enemy with superior firepower, they would need all the explosive force they could carry to make the battle more even.
Feeling more securely armed, the group took off again toward the alien camp. They flew at an intermediate altitude that was an awkward compromise of necessity-high enough to minimize the risks of being seen or heard from the ground, but low enough, they hoped, to slip in under the watchful gaze of the alien sensors that were scanning the skies for signs of imperial retribution. They hoped to get some aerial view of the enemy's layout without being spotted themselves; if they knew what the obstacles were, they could make better plans to overcome them.
Miraculously, their luck held. The aliens, so alert for ships coming from off the planet, paid almost no heed to anything that happened on Omicron itself. It fit the pattern the group had witnessed before, a casual disdain of any defense or offense the local humans could throw against them. It was as though the aliens, having humiliated Omicron's defenses in a few short hours, no longer worried about any threat from this direction. Perhaps they were preoccupied with future plans of conquest; aside from occasional forays to obtain slaves, they gave no thought to the Omicronians whatsoever. Jules found this strange behavior, but reminded himself they were dealing with alien minds that very probably had their own unique ways of looking at the universe.
At any rate, he was not going to count the teeth on this particular gift horse. The Empire needed this information too badly, and he was going to get all the aliens would allow him.
At last they approached the Long River valley and Lady A, who was piloting the copter, slowed their pace so they could get a better view. As they passed over a set of low hills, they caught sight of the slave camp sprawled casually on the riverbank. Their copter was so high that the figures were little more than dots, and it was impossible to tell which were humans and which were aliens. There was a continual stream of activity, though, as the slaves seemed in the process of building a small city around the outskirts of the large temporary inflated buildings.