"Scott Westerfeld - Succession 1 - The Risen Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

single advantage: the hostages. But surely they had made preparations for small craft.
After a few moments in the sun, the waiting was over.
"I'm getting echolocation from dead ahead, sir," Pilot Oczar announced.
"I can see them," Hendrik added. "Lots of them."
The enemy interceptors resolved before Marx's eyes as his craft responded to the
threat, enhancing vision with its other senses, incorporating data from the squadron's
other craft into his layers of synesthesia. As Marx had predicted, the interceptors were
small, unpiloted drones. Their only weapon was a long, sinuous grappling arm that
hung from the rotary lifting surface, which was more screw than blade. The devices
looked rather like something da Vinci might have designed four millennia ago, a
contraption powered by the toil of tiny men.
The interceptors dangled before Marx. There were a lot of them, and in their host they
impelled the same vaguely obscene fascination as creatures from the deepest ocean. One
moved toward his craft, arms flailing with a blind and angry abandon.
Master Pilot Marx tilted his Intelligencer's rotary wing forward and increased its
power. His ship rose above the interceptor, barely missing collision with the enemy's
lifting screw. Marx grimaced at the near miss. Another interceptor came into focus before
him, this one a little higher, and he reversed his wing's rotation, pushing the ship down,
dropping below its grasp.
Around him, the other pilots cursed as they pitched their craft through the swarm of
interceptors. Their voices came at him from all sides of his cockpit, directionally biased
to reflect their position relative to his.
From above, Hendrik spoke, the tension of a hard turn in her voice. "You've seen
these before, sir?"
"Negative," he replied. He'd fought the Rix Cult many times, but their small craft
were evolutionary. Small, random differences in design were scattered throughout every
generation. Characteristics that succeeded were incorporated into the next production
round. You never knew what new shapes and strategics Rix craft might assume. "The
arms are longer than I've soon, and the behavior's more ... volatile."
"They sure look pissed off," Hendrik agreed.
Her choice of words was apt. Two interceptors ahead of Marx sensed his craft, and
their arms began to flail with the sudden intensity of alligators when prey has stepped
into reach. He rolled his Intelligencer sideways, narrowing his vulnerable area as he
slipped between them.
But there were more and more of the interceptors, and his Intelligencer's profile was
still too large. Marx retracted his craft's sensory array, trading away vision for compact
size. At this range, however, the closest interceptors resolved to terrible clarity, the data
layers provided by first-, second-, and third-level sight almost choking his mind. Marx
could see (hear, smell) the individual segments of a grasping arm flexing like a snake's
spine, the cilia of an earspot casting jagged shadows in the hard sunlight. Marx squinted
at the cilia, gesturing for a zoom until the little hairs towered around him like a forest.
"They're using sound to track us," he announced. "Silence your echolocators now."
The view before him blurred as sonar data was lost. If Marx was right, and the
interceptors were audio-only, his squadron would be undetectable to them now.
"I'm tangled!" Pilot Oczar shouted from below him. "One's got a sensor post!"
"Don't fight!" Marx ordered. "Just lizard."
"Ejecting post," Oczar said, releasing his ship's captured limb.
Marx hazarded a glance downward. A flailing interceptor tumbled slowly away from
Oczar's ship, clinging to the ejected sensor post with blind determination. The
Intelligencer tilted crazily as its pilot tried to compensate for broken symmetry.