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The steady, controlled drop halted with a squeak of the winch and pulley. Then
it began again, a terrifying vertical plunge. The hoist mechanism clattered
loudly, and her stomach tried to glide up her throat.
The descent ended abruptly with a jolting impact that sent vibrations of pain
through her entire body, causing her forehead to slam smartly against the
underside of the lid and the back of her skull to rebound from the floor. The
air was nearly driven from her lungs.
She bit her lips, squeezing her eyes shut and waiting for the pain to recede.
She lay quietly, listening for any sounds near her. There was nothing from
nearby, but through the stillness faraway voices rose in harsh, wild screams
of anger.
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Dragging in a shuddery breath, Brigid opened her eyes and saw a golden shroud
of light peeping through the cracks. She fumbled for the inner catch, finding
it and snapping it aside. Before pushing the lid open, she pulled her
trans-comm unit from a pocket and opened the comm circuit to Kane's frequency.
All she heard was a muted cacophony of squawks and crackling squeals. When she
tuned to Grant's frequency, she got the same result. She fought off the dread
rising in her, assuming some energy force was interfering with the carrier
wave.
She put it back in her pocket.
Carefully, an inch at a time, Brigid pushed against the lid. A sensation
throbbed in her flesh, just beneath her skin, then deeper, an uncomfortable
tingling that stopped on the edge of actual pain.
She drew up her legs and slowly rose, lifting the lid with her. At first only
a mist filled with dancing flecks of golden light filled her field of vision.
Then her eyes pierced the vapor, and she stopped moving. What she saw crushed
her under the weight of a great, heart-stopping awe. Intellectually she had
some notion of what to expect, but emotionally she was unprepared for what she
saw.
A veil of light like diluted sunshine moved all around her, shimmering in the
air.
She felt subtle energies prickling her flesh, penetrating it, caressing her
bones.
Automatically she checked the rad counter on the lapel of her coat. The needle
was motionless on the far end of the green scale, then flicked far over to the
red and back to green again, like a deranged metronome. The light was a
tingling, buoyant, intangible web, and she could feel radiation rippling over
her in tiny waves. Though the wavelength couldn't be measured or accurately
registered on her counter, she was positive it was jamming her trans-comm
frequency.
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Axler, James - Outlanders 02 - Destiny Run
Brigid looked through the golden shimmer, stared past it, focusing her eyes on
whatever lay beyond it. She stood at the bottom of a huge cavity, cavernous
and circular in configuration. She guessed it to be fifty feet high, but she
had no idea of its circumference. Directly above her yawned a round,
metal-lipped opening, a shaft leading up to the surface. A sling made of
chains and fleece-lined leather was heaped around the crate. She didn't waste
time wondering what had distracted Tengri and whoever else had been operating
the hoist. She stepped out of the crate, treading carefully and slowly.
It took her a few moments to adjust her eyes to the diffuse light, learning
how to focus through it. Plates of dully gleaming alloy sheathed the floor.
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Many of them were buckled here and there, bulging but not showing splits. The
whole floor tilted slightly to the right, about five degrees out of true. As
if from a vast distance, she heard a rhythmic, familiar drone.
Massive wedge-shaped ribs of metal supported the roof and sides of the cavity.
The huge arching girders bore strange hieroglyphs, arranged in neat, compact
vertical rows. She walked very slowly, consciously keeping a tight grip on her
emotions, on her mind, not allowing herself to become lost in conjecture and
terror.
The lines of the vast chamber were deceptively simple, but when she tried to
follow the curves and angles, she found her head swimming and her eyes
stinging. There was a quality to the architecture that eluded the human mind,
as though it had been designed on geometric principles just slightly at a
tangent from the brain's capacity to absorb.
Looking overhead, she saw the gigantic shapes of six curved metal tubes
running
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Axler, James - Outlanders 02 - Destiny Run along the roof. One bore a crack in
the dark casing, and from this jagged opening the golden light spilled out a
blaze of incandescence that illuminated the interior of the craft. And it was
a craft that much was certain an enormous ovoid spaceship, not an underground
installation. Kharo-Khoto had been built over a giant flying disk that had
crashed here, God alone knew how many millennia ago. It was buried by the
drifting sand of ages and shrouded in Mongol myth and conferred divinity.
A few yards behind the cracked cylinder were the first short metal risers of a
stair that led up to a railed gallery. What lay on the gallery she couldn't
tell, but between her and the foot of the steps stood an oblong pedestal,
barely three feet tall. Four small pyramids crafted from pale golden alloy
were placed at equidistant points around it. Resting on their points was a
smooth, crystalline ovoid, around five feet long. It seemed filled with a
cloudy, smokelike substance.
Brigid approached it cautiously, drawing her breath deep. The tingling
sensation all over her body began to burn with a slow, cold heat. When she put
out a tentative hand to touch the crystal surface, she was ashamed of the
tremor in it.
At her touch, the vapor within the ovoid immediately cleared and she recoiled,
clamping her jaws shut on an automatic cry of fright. She was terrified and
she didn't know why. She had expected it, after all.
An Archon lay inside the transparent cocoon or what was left of one.
The supine figure lay on its back, the short, thin legs close together, the
arms crossed over the narrow chest, the inhumanly long, inhumanly delicate
fingers intertwined. It was very short, very slender and it had been dead for
such a long time that it had mummified.
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Dark gray skin was stretched drum tight over a protruding shelf of cheekbones
and arching supraorbital ridges. The face consisted primarily of two big,
hollow eye sockets, set beneath a high, hairless cranium. The large,
upslanting eyes had decomposed to nothing but tiny wads of desiccated black
gum. The small mouth, repulsively reptilian in its compressed neatness, was a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
