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

Jules was still not sure, but he was reluctant to press the matter any further. As they started forward again, he caught the wisps of a smile on Lady A's face, but he refused to let it bother him.
Another fifteen minutes' walk brought them to a road, which enabled them to increase their speed dramatically and was a great relief to all of them. Shortly after that they spotted some buildings up ahead to indicate the outskirts of the town.
No vehicles passed them as they walked along the road, and as they neared the first group of buildings they sensed a quiet that bespoke abandonment. There was no movement, no activity to indicate this was a place where people still lived. At a cautionary word from Jules they slowed their pace and approached the town warily.
The first couple of buildings were stores dealing with farm supplies-a grain and feed store and a shop that specialized in tools and farm machinery. Both had been locked up tight and abandoned. Across the street, a combination repair shop and garage was also shut, but it had been broken into and looted of tools. A few meters further down the road, a small grocery store had been completely ransacked; people fleeing the town had wanted to take plenty of provisions with them.
As they walked up the road into the heart of the town, the story remained unchanged. Everywhere around them, buildings had been closed up in a hurry; depending on their contents, some had later been broken into by people needing the supplies they contained. Further into town, the road became a more formal street, complete with sidewalks and houses lining the sides, but there was still no sign of the inhabitants. Cars, too, were nonexistent; all available vehicles seemed to have been grabbed in the general exodus.
Small animals scampered through the streets ahead of them. Not knowing much about the local fauna, it was hard to say whether the creatures were pets who'd been deserted or some of the larger vermin that had become bolder in the absence of people. Most of the animals were skittish and stayed well away from the humans, which was fine with Jules; he hadn't come here to conduct a wildlife survey.
The sun was just setting when they came to a store that sold fabric and clothing. The door was ajar; the building had been partially ransacked, but most of its inventory was intact. The team entered and found toweling to dry themselves off. The jumpsuits Jules and Yvette had brought along were sturdy, and when dry would be as good as new. Lady A's bodysuit seemed similarly durable. The other three team members, however, looked very much the worse for wear, and they took this opportunity to change into newer and better outfits. Yvette made sure Tatiana selected good clothing that would keep her warm and dry.
Jules felt guilty about simply taking merchandise from the store, so he left a note explaining that SOTE would pay for the articles they'd taken. Lady A watched him without comment, but there were traces of a bemused smile on her face.
A few doors away they came to a restaurant. It had been many hours since they'd eaten, and everyone except Lady A was ravenously hungry. The restaurant had been vandalized, too, but not all its supplies had been taken. Yvette volunteered to be chef and, even though most of the foods were strange to her, she managed to cook a pretty decent meal that filled them up.
It was completely dark by the time they finished eating, but the street lights had come on outside, indicating that at least some of the town's automatic mechanisms still functioned. They debated staying in the restaurant for the night, but there wasn't any place in the cafe to sleep comfortably. Instead they went down the street and broke into one of the larger homes, where they found beds that were more to their liking.
They were all dead tired, but Jules insisted they make arrangements for sleeping in shifts. He and Lady A would take watch for the first shift, Fortier and Ivanov would take the second, and Yvette and Tatiana would take the third. With that decided, the group settled in for the night.
When they were alone, Lady A turned to Jules. "I can understand that the rest of you need to sleep, but I see no reason why I should waste my time here with you. I can probably cover the rest of the town while you're sleeping and give you a thorough report in the morning."
"Part of the reason I'm here is to verify what you say," Jules told her. "I can't do that if you go off on your own."
"I'm merely going to eliminate the inessential," she argued back. "By combing the city while the rest of you sleep, I'll save you valuable time. If I find anything of material interest, I'll make a note of it and we can all explore it together in the morning."
That made a certain amount of sense-but Jules had learned to be cautious whenever anything related to Lady A made sense. "What if something should happen to you while you're off by yourself?"
Lady A gave him a cold smile. "You needn't worry about that, Comrade Wombat. I've always been quite good at looking out for myself."
And without giving him a chance to argue further, Lady A slipped out the door and was gone, leaving Jules alone. He was upset, and knew he shouldn't be. What she'd said made perfect sense. They were in a hurry on this mission, and as long as she didn't need to sleep there was no reason why she shouldn't do some independent exploring-as long as she shared her findings with the Empire team afterwards. At any rate, there was nothing Jules could have done to stop her short of using his blaster. Like it or not, he'd have to learn to trust the woman who was the Empire's archenemy.
***
The night passed without incident. Lady A returned at sunrise with a pleasant surprise-a large groundcar capable of holding them all in some comfort. "At least we won't have to wear ourselves out with long hikes any more," she said.
"I'd begun to wonder whether there were any cars left in town," Fortier said.
"I found this in a garage for repairs. I spent most of the night fixing it up for us."
"So now you're a mechanic, too," Yvette cracked.
Lady A looked at her unflinchingly. "When you've lived as long as I have, you learn a lot of things."
"Well, I'm glad we won't have to walk," Tatiana spoke up in defense of her boss.
"Any sign of the enemy?" Jules asked quickly, hoping to break up the growing animosity.
"No, nor any traces of the natives. The town's been deserted, as far as I can tell." Lady A was all business again. "This is consistent with what my informant told me. He said everyone was running away from the cities, hoping to hide out in the countryside."
"Perhaps we should try to track some of them down," Ivanov said. They might give us eyewitness accounts of what happened."
Lady A shook her head. "We know what happened. We want to know what will happen. The people hiding in the country can't help us do that. We have to find the invaders and infiltrate them to learn their plans."
They went back to the restaurant for a quick breakfast, and then set out once again. Lady A drove the large groundcar at speeds that made even Jules and Yvette breathless. The conspiracy's leader relied on the super-swift reflexes of her robot body to maneuver the car at a rate no flesh-and-blood human would safely attempt. They were out of the small town in no time, cruising down the paved road toward the next village.
A couple of times they thought they spotted motions along the side of the road, people running and hiding at the sight of the car. Lady A ignored those distractions and drove on. Her reasoning was that the people who ran and hid were not the people they were here to see. It was the invaders who boldly took what they wanted that interested her.
Once an aircraft flew overhead, and for that they did stop. The six of them quickly piled out of the car to catch a glimpse of the vessel as it flew past. It was a vehicle of a design none of them had ever seen before, and they had little chance to see it now: It zipped by and over the horizon in just a few seconds. If it had spotted them, it obviously was not interested.
The next town they came to was a virtual replay of the first-quiet, open, abandoned by its citizens. There was no sign that any of the invaders had been here, but the townspeople had taken no chances. They'd escaped while it was still possible from an enemy that showed no mercy.
They found some maps in the town and learned that they were now only a few kilometers outside Barswell City. After a short conference, Jules and Lady A agreed it was in their interest to view some of the damage from the initial bombardment firsthand. Even if the invaders weren't there, it would give some indication of the unknown enemy's destructive capabilities. That would be most useful in devising any military strategies for combating this menace.
It was Fortier who spotted the walking tower first. He saw it as a speck on the horizon-but it moved, and that caught his peripheral vision. He pointed and the others looked, too-and Lady A immediately swung the car off the road to pursue in that direction. The land around was relatively flat, so the car had little trouble maneuvering through the fields. When they came to fences, Lady A drove through at demon speeds, relentless in her pursuit of this promising object.
It was not until they got closer that they could appreciate the tower's size. It was built roughly like an oil derrick, seven stories tall, with the metallic legs carrying it in great land-devouring strides. Atop the derrick was a round, flattened plate like a circular observation deck. Some of its surface was white, while other parts were reflective silver. It was impossible to see inside, but that didn't mean it was impossible to see out.
"Not so close," Yvette cautioned. "We don't want them to spot us."
"From that height, if they haven't already seen us they're too blind for us to worry about," Lady A replied as she drove with her customary abandon. "It's merely a question of whether they consider us important enough to bother with."
"There's still no point in tempting them," Fortier said. "I've seen enough soldiers on patrol to know that even if they don't consider us a threat, they might decide to use our car for target practice."
Lady A ignored the comment and drove on after the tower. The point quickly became moot, however, as the car hit a patch of mud left over from the previous day's rain. The car skidded around in a full-circle turn and one wheel became mired, spinning uselessly and throwing up great globs of mud.
By the time they all got out and freed the car once more, the tower was gone. There was hope for a future encounter, though, since it had been headed directly into Barswell City where the team was already going. They drove quickly back to the road and continued along their previous path, anticipating their first close encounter with the enigmatic enemy.
The outskirts of Barswell City looked undamaged, but they too stood deserted. As the team drove 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 between twenty and forty of them. As far as he could see, they stood no chance at all against the enemy's war machine.