"Benford G - Tides of Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

weather, or the complex fabric of tides and currents, air and
water, it was no great leap for him to suppose some similar
shadowed mystery might apply to the raging lives of stars.

Anger forked through this sky. Behind them spun the crimson
disk of the Eater, a great gnawing mouth. It ate suns whole and
belched hot gas. In Argo's flight from Snowglade, which swam
near the Eater, they had beaten out against streaming, infalling
dust that fed the monster. Its great disk was like burnt sugar at
the rim, reddening steadily toward the center. Closer in swirled
crisp yellow, and nearer still a bluewhite ferocity lived, an enduring
fireball.

Looking outward, Killeen could see on the grandest scale the
structure his Aspects told him should be there. The entire galaxy
lurked like a silvery ghost beyond the swarthy dustlanes. It, like
the Eater, was a disk--but incomparably greater. Killeen had seen
ancient pictures of the regions beyond the Center, a lake of stars.
But that lake did not ripple and churn. Here tides of light swept
the sky, as though some god had chosen Center as her final
incandescent artwork. Their target star spun ahead, a mote among

wrack and storm, and all their hopes now bore upon it.

And floating in this seethe, their enemy.

He squinted, failed to find it. Argo was nearing the verge of a
jetblack cloud. The distant mech vehicle probably lay somewhere
within the obliterating darkness there. Abraham's Star was struggling
free of the massive shroud. Soon Argo could peer through
the shredding fringes of the cloud to find her planets.


TIDES OF LIGHT
3


A notion tugged at Killeen but he shrugged it aside, caught up
in the spectacle all around him. The heavens worked with ribbed
and scaly light, like luminescent beasts drowning in inky seas.

What were the chances, he wondered, that merely showing
himself out here would tempt the mech vehicle to skewer him
with a bolt? No one knew--which, in the paradoxical logic of
leadership, was why he had to do it.

Killeen had started this hull-walking ritual a year before, at
the urging of one of his principal Aspects, a truly ancient encased
personality named Ling. Revered and respected, the Aspect had
been given to Killeen by the Family with high attendant ceremony