[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

avenues running back into the gloom from a small clear space around the pit.
Odd-shaped objects taller than he was. Machines, perhaps, eternal as the
seedship, designed maybe by the Master Builders on whatever far-off world they
had ruled - designed to operate the craft for Attack Command? Carefully,
making the most of his dwindling energy, he shuffled to inspect them.
Light flashed behind him.
Spinning to face it, he met the bug.
Most of those looming, boxlike masses were time-tarnished metal, nearly black,
but one was warm enough to glow like Defender's own body, dully infrared.
Taller than the rest, it stood far off, at the end of a shadowy alley. If the
others were a robot crew, shut down now, he thought this one might be the
commander, still in operation. The bug had come from somewhere behind it.
Olid-ing silently and fast, the thing stopped in the middle of that gloomy
avenue, twenty meters away.
His own heat-energy had cooled too long. Swinging grog-gily to meet the bug,
he found himself floating off the deck and had to make a desperate stab with
one magnetic toe to get back. Unarmed and bewildered, too far gone even to
plan any action, he could only hang there, waiting.
The bug lay still, the disk on its golden carapace turning slowly bright
enough to show the wall of a thick-ribbed dome that curved up beyond the
red-glowing block. The great craft's nose arched high above him. Scanning it
for any weapon the Master Program might let him use, for any hopeful chance,
he found only ancient metal.
He saw the disk tipping toward him. The light of it focused to fix him with an
unsteady beam. He yearned for another burst of its restoring radiation, but
the swift-pulsed flicker stayed too faint to help him. A rattle of static. A
soundless howl. A harsh, inhuman voice.
"Attack Command to Unidentified."
"Guest - " he tried to say. "Guest to Attack - "
"Attention, Unidentified. You establish no authority for
Page 32
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
existence here. Attack Command requires your removal - "
"Removal not required!"
Trying to shout, he saw no hint that the bug received anything. It lay inert,
looking as lifeless as a metal ingot. The flickering signal had ceased, but
the gray-glowing face of the disk was still fixed upon him like a solitary
eye, alertly hostile.
"Guest to Attack Command." He tried again. "We do not resist. Our own commands
protect you. All we seek is to survive - "
He saw the second bug.
Darting from somewhere about that red-glowing tower, it stopped close behind
the first. They looked almost identical, featureless, flat masses, but the
second carried something else on its sleek yellow shell.
Something cylindrical, pointing at him.
He gathered his last energy and tried to sharpen his fading senses to study
it. A dark hollow tube. A missile launcher - with a dark projectile already
emerging! Desperately, he accelerated. Swaying aside, he reached fast enough
but very gingerly to grasp it, let the momentum of its heavy little mass spin
his body until its direction was reversed.
"Master Program to Defender!" The warning rang in his dimming mind, edged
again with that mocking trace of Megan. "Advanced beings are not to be
attacked - "
Obediently, as the missile left his fingers, he turned it slightly upward to
let it miss the bugs. Before his vision went out, he saw that it would strike
that red-glowing sentinel.
"Defender! You will not injure any being - "
The computer voice was fading, but its commands no longer mattered. All
awareness dying, he was floating off the deck - The blast had thrown him off
the truck. He lay in foul mud, blood in his mouth, cold rain drumming on his
back. A reek of spilled gasoline. Too near. He fought for breath, fought to
drag himself farther, slid back into the muck.
A second soft explosion. A gentle roaring, louder than the rain. He heard the
driver's strangled prayer to the mother of God, heard Prieto screaming. Poor
devils, but nothing he can do. Howls and hoarse curses. Three quick
shots. Then only the roar of the fire till the wet weeds on the bank above him
began to hiss and crackle.
Heat increasing. The rank stink of the charred weeds and a bitter whiff of
burning hair and flesh. Cold rain trickling. Salt sweat biting where the hide
had been scraped off his hands and cheek. He needed to lie there longer, to
get his breath and clear his throbbing head.
But the ammo -
Got to get further while I can. Head up and never mind the giddiness. Fight
the muck and breathe the stink. Grab that bush. Claw up the bank. Slide back
and try again -
A hard concussion. The ammo, too soon. Duck and run. Christ, my knee - Damn
thing numb and then the crunching pain. No good for anything. Down in the mud
again on hands and the other knee, dragging the leg, scrambling for cover in
the jungle.
One royal hell of a fix for an old pro at the game, but I'm not done for. Yet.
Not if I can make it back to the wreck of the chopper and work the radio -
He was floating -
Somewhere in the dark. In the hospital tent, he thought at first. Under ether,
maybe; he felt no pain, not even in his knee. Butch and Mascarenas must have
come back with the other chopper to pick him up. But where were all the jungle
croaks and chirps and shrieks? Where was anybody? Trying to turn in the bed to
see where he was, he found no bed. Only empty darkness all around him.
He was actually floating, his body turning slowly in the air - but here, of
course, there was no air. He saw faint light and then the bugs drifting above
him under the black-ribbed vault
Killed?
Page 33
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Watching their slow tumble, he saw no hint of life or action. Two odd-shaped
slabs of dull-gold metal, they had no visible limbs or organs of sense, no
wheels or tracks or anything else projecting. Even the shining disk and the
missile launcher were gone.
Helpless, disabled, and adrift in that frigid gloom, he clung to his dulled
awareness and waited for some new attack. None came, and he wondered dimly
why. If the great spacecraft had been left in orbit to defend the planet, why
had it fought him so feebly? Perhaps, he thought,
those missing landers had carried the crew away, leaving only the robots
aboard. And, after thousands of years, perhaps they were running down.
His own run-down body kept very slowly spinning, like a tiny world in space.
The two dead bugs went by again, like companion planets. The black vault
climbed again above him, an ominous sky with a pale moon in it. The moon was
the disk. Floating near him, it was turning to light the deck beneath. When
his own rotation let him see it, he found the shaft through which he had come,
the radiating alleys of identical block-shapes around it, the taller thing the
deflected missile had hit now no longer glowing.
Dead!
"Master Program to Defender." That cold internal reprimand shattered his
momentary triumph. "You are defective. You have malfunctioned. You have killed
advanced inhabitants - "
"The missile was their own." Stubbornly, he defended his rebel self. "They [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • thierry.pev.pl

    •