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Annie moved out.
As Rand turned to go, snatching his makeshift ski poles out of the
ground, Rook seemed to be about to say something or even grab his arm. But
when she saw he was looking at her, she abruptly turned away.
Annie turned out to be a better skier than Rand himself, though neither
of them was very good. Then Annie got fancy, Rand tried to chastise her-a bad
move while skiing-and they both ended up in a snowbank.
It proved to be a heaven-sent spill; shadows crossed the snow and Invid
Pincer Ships landed to examine things that had fallen from Annie's pink
rucksack. Somehow, the skiers' tracks had been obliterated by the drift of
snow on the slope.
"That's my bikini!" Annie yelped, struggling to get to her feet and take
on the entire Invid horde by herself. Rand pushed her face down further in the
snow, stifling her.
The Invid hooked the bikini bottom in question (Why was she carrying it
on a ski run? Rand wondered) in its claw, and raised it close to its optic
sensor for examination. The mini-panty had in turn hooked one of the metallic
submarine-sandwich-like charges the team had prepared for the fortress job.
Seeing it tottering there in the seat of the bikini, Rand pushed the
struggling Annie even further into the snow. The sapper charge tottered and
fell. Rand exhaled in relief when the charge proved inert. The Invid personal
armor mecha dropped the bikini bottom and rocketed away on a wash of
thruster-fire.
Skiing to the base of the fortress mountain held no other terrors; they
kicked off their improvised bindings. A modified grenade launcher got a
grapnel up to an opening. There was terror in the climb, as they watched a
patrol of Shock Troopers cruise by below them. But the Invid didn't notice the
climbing rope, and the Humans pulled themselves up near the topmost access
tunnel.
Annie nearly fainted back into Rand's arms; a Shock Trooper mecha was
standing there.
Rand shoved the edge of his hand in Annie's mouth and she bit down so
hard that she drew blood. But the Trooper appeared to be looking at the
surrounding peaks with no more interest than an Alpine sightseer. It turned to
go, each step sounding like a boiler being thrown down on a concrete floor,
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back down the dark, arched tunnel from which it had come. Rand rubbed his hand
and wondered if Annie had had her shots lately.
The two pushed their goggles back and went in after the Trooper. The
tunnel was a place of heat gradients, the chamber at the end being almost
womblike in its warmth and moisture. It was a bizarre landscape of structures
that looked like neurons and axons (or were they stalactites and
stalagmites?). Dendrites bent and arched, and the undulating ceiling resembled
Liver Surprise. Cable-thick creepers ran from the squishy-looking support
members. A knee-high mist obscured everything. "All this place needs is bats,"
Rand whispered.
Bela Lugosi, where are you?
They sprinted through the echoing, gutlike halls of the Invid, trying
not to breath. Annie had banished all rational thought from her brain, and so
she was surprised when Rand hauled her behind one of the sticky-looking
dendrite pillars.
There was a strange echo as the three smaller mecha stumped by, these
ones only eight or nine feet tall, their optical sensors set in long snouts.
They had the faces of metallic archer-fish. Even the two Humans heard the
resonating message in the Regis's voice, the very armor of the enemy
reverberating with it, "All my outlying units, report to transmutation chamber
at once!"
Rand watched them lumber off. "This could be a lot harder than we
figured."
He had pushed Annie into the shadows of a doorway of some kind, and she
began experimenting with the wet-looking, illuminated membranes that looked
like buttons.
A door-size sphincter opened next to her; she gasped, seeing what lay
beyond, then giggled. "Open Sesame!" Words she had always dreamed of using, so
appropriate now. There were certainly more than forty bad guys in this cave.
The two stepped into the next chamber, awestruck, gazing around them.
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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