Готовый перевод Хроники Аскета: Вторжение / The Ascet Chronicles: Invasion: Глава 7

Chapter 7

The next morning we went down again. The first time we went down, not many people were watching, but now there was a crowd of about forty. Whip told us that we were in some kind of unhealthy popularity. Strange rumors were floating around the camp, and everyone wanted to see us. A student showed an article in "VK", which called us mutants, bred by scientists specifically for the cleansing of the Nests, described as aliens from parallel worlds, and other such nonsense. Article - I wonder if we were informed about the start of the operation a week ago, how did the authors know? - Everyone was eager to read it, and the Internet was overflowing with references to it. It was funny: they often saw us in the camp, but usually took us for commandos, especially since my friends had many friends in the "seasoned" unit. For some reason I was considered an FSB officer, I don't know why. They treated me accordingly.

On the first level, there was an unaccustomed buzz of activity. The newcomers walked in groups, accompanied by more experienced fighters who helped them become accustomed to the Nest's oddities. Science men carried strange instruments and boxes containing soil or plant samples-if you could call them plants - the engineers were busily finishing clearing the tunnel to the second tier.

"I'm a little confused by this picture," I nodded at the large-caliber machine gun staring out of the tunnel. "Are you sure we won't get shot on the way out?"

"Ascetic, don't croak. They won't." Wicked pointed to the aisle. "You see the bars up there? They're going to put it down now, and when we get back, the boys will look at us first, and then they'll let us through."

"All things considered?"

"It's not the first time we've done this. However, there are some inconsistencies..." He frowned, remembering something of his own. He calmed me down, yeah.

Our group had six people: me, Wicked, Rinat, Ivan the first, Ivan the second, and a guy called Weasel. We were in third place, so we sat and waited for Student's group to return. I did the exercises shown by Daniel. Wicked was telling tales about our training. Judging by the stories, the program was worked out by none other than Dr. Mengele. An hour passed like that.

All of a sudden, the first group appeared out of the tunnel. I wondered: at such a short distance I should have sensed their presence - why didn't I feel anything? Was it the barrier properties of the material that made up the walls, or something else?

Student handed the Wicked a drawing of the route:

"Look, we were on the right branch, and we ran into a level 3 creature here, and we didn't find a chamber."

"All right, then we'll look at it from here. Ascet, put the Helmet and the Wall."

It was easy to follow the route we had already examined. All the traps were removed in front of us, and Wicked spotted a couple of strangers and shot them from afar. He wasted four magazines, though he'd shot ten out of ten on the range: the bullets in the Nest had strange trajectories. He preferred not to waste energy, so he wove a Fireball in advance and kept it active in front of him. In about ten minutes the explored area was over, the pace of movement immediately dropped, and now we were moving at a slow turtle's pace.

The faint pressure on the sign made me stop. If the last time we'd been mentally attacked, the sign had crackled from the pressure it was under, now it was like a heavy cloak slowly descending on our defenses. The alien wasn't trying to break the barrier in its way - it was just looking for us, and it seemed to have found us.

"Wicked, he's coming. Someone dangerous."

Wicked nodded, immediately weaved Invisible Armor, and moved forward. We were standing in a straight tunnel - Wicked in front, followed by me and the rest of the fighters in a semicircle. In principle, my Air Wall could slow any creature to level three, and the Invisible Armor could do more, but the risk remained. How do we distinguish levels of aliens? Roughly, by energy. Roughly speaking, each alien's aura "glows" depending on its power: the brighter the "light," the more dangerous the alien is. But that's what we fighters do - scientists have developed a more accurate classification.

The creature that appeared in front of us broke through my Wall, and the broken sign sent a sharp pain through my head. I couldn't think for a couple of seconds, then my mind snapped open, the sound of machine guns rumbling in my ears. I saw the aliens break through Wicked's armor. The creature's chest was burned, the bullets drumming against the black armor, but the creature continued to press with such monstrous force that it was obvious: Wicked wasn't going to hold out much longer. One look was enough to make me realize that, and my mind rapidly weaved the Death Claw, the strongest attack sign in our arsenal, one that required a lot of strength and energy. It took me five seconds to weave it in practice, but now it was probably three seconds, because my hormones, spurred on by fear, had sped up my perception of the world. I felt the Claw blow the ugly head off the creature before I fainted.

I was brought to my senses quickly - the body of the creature was still twitching. Wicked and I just sat opposite each other and tried to come to our senses, the fighters surrounded us in a ring and peered into the reddish darkness over their sights. Finally Wicked spoke up:

"Strong creature. A level four, no less. It had a sign on it - some kind of protection, a fireball alone wouldn't have penetrated it. Good thing it attacked me, not the others."

"Probably decided to kill the most dangerous one first. He attacked the first sign bearer."

We were really lucky. First, the Fireball weakened the alien's defenses, then the machine guns distracted it, then I managed to create the Claw. If the creature had attacked ordinary soldiers without trying to penetrate the Armor, things might have ended differently.

"You okay?" Wicked ignored the instructions, took off his gas mask, and wiped the blood running from his nose.

"That's fine. I had both signs blown off, and after the new installation there will be about forty-seven to forty-eight units left."

"I have about sixty left. Here's what I think..." He rubbed his forehead, trying to concentrate. "A creature such powerful is probably a guard. I mean, the door to the cell isn't far. I don't want to risk the guards standing around one by one, so here's what we do now. We put on Armor, Wall, Helmet, and very, very slowly crawl forward. If there is another one of those tanks out there, we fall back. We have another twenty minutes before the turning point - we climb into some side tunnel, poke around in it. Then we'll come back and report. They'll probably send all three groups on the remaining guards: it's dangerous to go alone."

I shrugged.

"It's hard to hold three signs at once; our sensitivity would drop drastically. It is better to hold one Armor - it is more reliable."

A few minutes later, we were crawling through the tunnel again. I held three signs at once, Wicked carried only the Armor. I could feel him warily "listening," and sometimes his tentacles of consciousness touched me, too. We were getting closer and closer to the large cave, which we assumed might be the passageway to the queen's chamber, and gradually the pace slowed down. The tension had reached such a level that I was eager to meet any creature - anything - as long as it would get rid of the exhausting uncertainty. So when Wicked suddenly stopped and raised his hand, I breathed a sigh of relief:

"What's out there?"

"Hell, I don't know. There's definitely someone there, twenty-five meters ahead. It's too far away, I can't tell if it's level four, maybe it's level one, we need to get closer. Can you feel anything?"

"No."

"Okay, let's go."

After walking a little farther, Wicked stopped:

"That's it, we're not going any further. It's a four, I can feel it. Let's turn around."

"Wait." I felt the touches on the shield of someone else's consciousness. "He can see us."

We froze, getting ready to attack, but the creature stayed where it was. Five minutes passed while we waited, and then Wicked hissed:

"Sure the creature can see us?"

"I can feel it pressing on the Helmet. It may not know who exactly is in front of it, but someone's presence is certain." I was quiet, then added. "Do you feel a sign over it?"

"Yeah, it's kind of unfamiliar."

"I think it's waiting for us to get closer, and then it will strike."

We could go back, but we still had no confidence that the royal cell was nearby. This alien might well have been just a high-level creature, not a guard. Sure, the ability to use signs is characteristic of "officers," but the strange behavior might have indicated a slowness and insecurity not usually characteristic of aliens. In the end, Wicked cursed and ordered:

"Reinforce the Wall to its maximum." He began to pump energy into the Armor.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm trying to get close enough to shoot with the grenade launcher and see how it reacts."

Shooting in the dungeons of the Nest is difficult not only because visibility does not exceed four or five meters. As I said before, space behaves strangely: the straight line here is not the shortest distance between points. Shooting from a long distance, you can be sure of a miss. His psi powers were playing on Wicked's side, but the chance of hitting the target was still slim.

We lay down, and Wicked took a couple of steps forward and fired a grenade. The shrapnel whipped through the Wall, and the alien mark flashed brightly in my head with sharp pain.

"What was that?" There were colorful circles in my eyes.

"It fired some kind of beam, and the Wall was just blown off. Good thing he missed, the armor might not have held." Wicked lay down next to me, the thing sat where it was. "Shall we go? We need two Walls and Armor against that guy, and we're running out of time. Let's get back to the crossover, get another group, kill the thing, and go straight to rest."

The return trip took about twenty minutes. The Executor's group was on shift at that time. The groups were originally supposed to spend about an hour on the second tier, but reality made its adjustments - it came out to be an hour and a half. Our suggestion was to the Executor's liking. Locating the jump to the next level was the hardest job of all - mine the passageway and the flow of creatures from the royal chamber would stop. If the rest of the officer was really a guardian, he'd be hard to beat on his own, but two teams would do the job just fine.

We went back and lay down in the same spot where the alien shot caught us.

"Well?" The executioner looked ahead and grimaced. "How are we going to kill him?"

"What's there to think about? We put three Walls, pump up the Armor to the maximum each, go forward, when Ascet cuts with the Claw, throw grenades. Or throw fire - it's up to you to decide."

"We can't." Perhaps my appetites are growing, but I thought it possible to take the risk. "We lose the sign."

"What do you mean? The Walls will blow away, of course, but the Armor will withstand it."

"No. That's the sign the alien is using."

My friends paused to ponder the sentence. Humans have learned to operate with six signs, each of which was obtained purely by accident. Extracted. They were achieved at a great cost. For the Death Claw, for example, the Chinese paid with the death of half the group (hence the name). I suggested that we make a conscious effort to copy another sign, a task that is difficult but not impossible. We estimated the approximate strength of the sign used by the alien to be equal to the Death Claw: it could be of great use. Not to mention the fact that the scientists would be grateful to us for such a gift for the rest of their lives.

In short, there were good reasons to try to get a sign, but two more than good reasons pressed against this proposal. The first was that we did not know how to copy the sign: we had not been taught such a thing. Not even in theory. The second was the creature itself - it wasn't going to just sit there and watch the enemy flicker.

Nevertheless, they liked the idea; they immediately appreciated its prospects. After some thought, a kind of brainstorming, the following method was developed. Quite risky, but nothing more clever came to our minds at the time. Me, Wicked, and Whip put up the Walls, saturating them with energy to the maximum, and covered the Executor, who, in Invisible Armor, came as close as possible and tried to see the stranger's sign in all its details.

The first attempt ended rather painfully: all three Walls were breached, and the creature's beam only stuck in the Invisible Armor. The Executor, of course, couldn't memorize the sign - hard to do even under ideal conditions, but when someone else's attack is aimed at you... We had to put up two more Walls before the creature began to run out of energy. It put less energy into its attacks now, and its Executщr's Armor was able to deflect them easily. The escorting fighters were taken aback by the explanation, which didn't convince them to stick their necks out for "who knows what". I think they thought we were insane. Wicked and I was completely out of energy, our shells nearly exhausted when the Executor finally said he was done. We stepped back and watched him try to create a new sign for the first time.

Twice the sign "broke off," and the Executor had to start constructing it all over again. Thank God, the breakdowns did no harm. In the end, the strange, ghostly construction hovered between his hands.

"Are you sure it has to be like this?" I could hear the skepticism in Wicked's voice. "It doesn't look like the ones we already know."

"Let's check it out. Come on, put up the Walls for the last time."

Both we and our enemy threw signs at the same time. As on the previous occasions, the alien's beam broke through our barriers and, weakening, stopped before it reached the Executor. The Executor's result was far more startling: the energy cluster in his hand exploded into a bright white beam, piercing his shields and armor. Crearure convulsed, but stopped after one fireball. Seeing that it showed no sign of life, we moved closer, and could see who had worn us out so badly.

The alien looked like an armored cone without any sense organs - just a block of stone, that's all. There was a hole in the middle of it, and a thin stream of viscous liquid gushed out. A fireball had entered the wound and burned the insides, but the strange liquid continued to ooze and would not dry up.

Unfortunately, we could not fully enjoy our moment of triumph because we were exhausted. The corpse also stank badly - the smell could be felt even through the filters of the mask. A short distance away we found the entrance to the queen's chamber. We were exhausted. The only thing we could do was to booby trap the exit of the cell and wearily make our way to the passageway to the first tier. There we found Student's group, which had not had time to rest, but was still in better condition than we were. Immediately after our report, Student and Hawk went to guard the booby-trapped exit, Executor began to show the new sign to the swarm of scientists, and the rest went up to the surface. We had about an hour to recover. Then we would have to go down again: the clearing of the tier was not yet finished.

Внимание! Этот перевод, возможно, ещё не готов.
Его статус: идёт перевод

Переведено на Нотабеноиде
http://notabenoid.org/book/83541/524154

Переводчики: Camrad_RIP