Читать онлайн «Invasion»

White clouds fled through blue skies. The sea chanted fearfully below. Waves crowded shoulder to shoulder and shoved each other. Gray land crouched at the edge of Dominaria, hiding itself in veils of yellow steam.

Evil hung in the heavens. Something was coming, something horrible, and it would emerge without warning from clear air.

It came. The thing carved a sudden line in the sky. The trough it cut deepened. It tore water from the air and hurled it outward in white flames. This was no meteor, no dumb stone from heedless heavens. This thing clove the sky with intent.

Air streamed away from a lancing prow and sawtoothed keel. It drummed gunwales of living wood on its way into roaring intakes and across wide-swept wings. This was a ship, a skyship – the sort that had ruled Thrannish skies. Loose tongues told of new fleets built by Urza and secreted away to fight Phyrexians, but who believed in Urza? Who believed in Urza's bogey men? Who had ever seen even a single skyship?

Until now.

It was a sleek and glorious, horrible thing, this Weatherlight. Nature cringed away from it. Still, it was not the dreamed-of evil. Something else was coming, something far more horrible than Weatherlight.

Tiny figures stood on her wind-ravaged deck-human figures.

Behind a gleaming ray cannon on the forecastle was strapped a man with black hair and angry eyes.

He shouted into a speaking tube, "Coordinates, Hanna!"

A powerstone embedded in the mouth of the tube snatched up his voice and hurled it a hundred feet aft to the glass-enclosed bridge.

The words raked out over a slim, hunched woman. Rules and styluses were clutched in one of her hands. The other jotted slide-rule calculations in a hasty column.

Blowing an errant strand of blonde back from her face, Hanna did her own shouting into the tube, "Working on it, Commander Gerrard!" Across her navigation console, compasses and gyros reeled. Hanna's eyes spun as she watched them settle. "Good luck finding another navigator who can pinpoint longitude without stars. "

"I don't want another navigator," Gerrard answered from the forecastle. He threw a grin back toward the bridge. "I just want my favorite navigator to get us to Benalia. "

Hanna summed three columns of figures and assigned functions to them. "We're still twelve hundred miles out, this time north by northwest. "

"Damn! That's the farthest of the three," Gerrard said. "Where's the problem?"

"Not here," Hanna replied, confirming the calibration of her altimeter.

"Not here, either," reported another woman, standing at the helm. Her corded shoulders and ebony skin seemed part of the ship's wheel she clutched. "Rudder, keel, airfoils-everything's performing perfectly, including me. "