"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

CHEAP THRILLS AND BAD DREAMS

Once the principles of subverting the speed limit of light are discovered, usually by accident and with nobody really believing it, the age of a people's interstellar expansion and colonization begins and starts moving so rapidly that vast changes take place at lightning speed.
On Earth, it had been a team of scientists from several western nations working on a particle physics project having nothing at all to do with space travel who stumbled on it at a government lab in California. By the time they realized what they had, and the government also realized what it had, part of the cat was already out of the bag. By the time it was funded on even a limited basis, nine other nations had stolen the process. In fact, the only reason it was finally fully funded and supported by the nations that discovered it was because at least three other nations had practical ships built first. In fact, Earth came very close to having the nuclear war it had dreaded over who owned what.
Fortunately, by that point, several international blocs' initial probes had established a surprising number of interesting and potentially habitable worlds out there. In full egocentric arrogance, a treaty was finally hammered out dividing the galaxy, of all things, into spheres of influence, with all preexisting claims recognized where they were. The fact that once you made the initial horrendous investment to create the machines and materiel that could build the machines and fuels required, interstellar travel proved cheaper per trip than interplanetary travel, also had something to do with it.
Within only a century after the first ships had left Earth, humanity had over a hundred solar systems within its grasp, although, to be sure, most of them were totally worthless and held on to only for pride, speculation, or because they were between two places worth going to. It was an impressive array nonetheless. During that period, the first extraterrestrial life forms were discovered, and whole massive new fields of extraterrestrial study opened up. No other sentient races were discovered in this period, but hope springs eternal, and all sides had no doubt that sooner or later their bloc would be the first to meet a truly alien race and convert it to their way.
One bloc included the United States, Canada, and most of western Europe except the French, who made an ingenious deal with some of the major Latin American nations and a few of the better-off African nations to form their own Latin bloc. The Japanese, refusing to sign on as junior partners in the West's coalition, formed a full partnership with China that put politics on the back burner and formed another bloc, while the Russians formed an eclectic bloc that included not only their usual worldwide allies and client states but also India, desperate, like China, to find new worlds for an impossibly large population.
AH of them competed with each other in the usual historical ways, and all established colonies among the relatively near stars of the spiral arm which Earth was a part of. Certainly there were strains, but there was also a lot of optimism that this was going to go on forever.
It took almost two hundred years of expansion before humanity met its first sentient nonhuman races, and when it did, it had a shock. When a scout for the Exchange first discovered a Western bloc colonial world, it didn't exactly send greetings.
Instead it claimed the colony as property of the Exchange and gave orders on just what to do next.
The ancient and sophisticated empire that discovered Earth's colonies had been through this many times before. Reports indicated that the discovered world was a mere colony, and relatively new at that, and that there were a lot of people colonizing worlds out there.
Almost as soon as word spread through-the Exchange of this new race, spies from both the Mycohl and Mizlaplan Empires sent the same details and coordinates to their own masters, who quickly tried to guess the origins of this new race and its obvious pattern of colonial spread. A rush was on once more, but this time three old and wily empires were in a race to gobble up as much of humanity as possible.
Even facing a common threat, humanity only reluctantly joined forces, and when they did, they discovered that their foe was massive, at least a few thousand years more practiced at this sort of thing, and that there wasn't much they could do about it. Later, historians would note that the greatest cost to humanity hadn't been the loss of its autonomy but the crushing of racial ego. In just a bit over two thousand years humans had gone from feeling themselves the center of and model for creation to accepting the role of relatively insignificant subjects of a universe far more vast and complex than they had allowed themselves to imagine.
The bulk of the Western bloc and also most of its affiliated Latin bloc had gone under the Exchange simply because their world had been discovered by an Exchange scout. The Sino-Japanese bloc had fallen mostly to the Mizlaplan, while the Soviet-led bloc went to the Mycohl. The fall was in some cases nasty but quite swift and absolute. The Exchange had over a hundred and forty "member" races; the Mycohl had almost that many, and the Mizlaplan slightly more. They had been at this a very long time.
In the end, some adjustments were made for the sake of practicality among the three conquering powers, but the basic divisions of humanity remained. In the freewheeling Exchange, the Western bloc and Latin bloc remnants settled in quite well into a system that allowed them to remain very much as they were, although a minority and subject people. The Mycohl and the Mizlaplan probably hated each other more than either one hated the Exchange, but both were united in insisting that new subject peoples were to be "culturally unified" with the rest of their empires. The Exchange conquered territory and live bodies; the Mycohl and the Mizlaplan wanted the minds and souls as well.
Within a very few generations, humanity had become more divided than it ever was on Earth, groups having more in common with fellow members of their empires who were spawned by different and bizarre evolutionary paths than with those with whom they were racially linked in the other empires.
Still, reduced to minority status, a small group within a huge empire, all three masses of humanity did recognize that there was only one way back to status and power within the terms of their new cultures. As the primitive, junior members of their empires, they bred like rabbits in a trio of multiracial ancient cultures that by this point bred rather slowly and in tightly controlled fashion. This worked best in closed, somewhat unitary cultures, where numbers meant strength and power and influence. The Mizlaplan had gotten the Chinese and the Mycohl had gotten the Indians, both large population groups, and could claim more positions, more room, and more worlds for themselves quickly.
The Exchange had gotten the Latins, and allowed them to maintain local control over the worlds they had colonized. But access to wealth and power came harder in a society where new worlds were not distributed but sold in the marketplace, and where everything you needed had to be paid for with something somebody else wanted to buy. In the capitalist empire of the Exchange, ironically, humanity had fared the worst, and was still very much a junior partner.
The heart of the Empire was the Exchange itself, the great tubular building in the heart of the capital city deep within the Empire. Inside, virtually anything within the basic limitations of the system could be bought or sold.
One great quartzlike structure contained the commodities brokerage, where resources and futures could be bought and sold. Another was strictly a shares exchange, wherein one could buy, sell, and trade bits and pieces of the millions of companies that ran much of the empire's vast economy. There were other, smaller, more specialized brokerages as well, but the heart of the Exchange and its physical center was the grand Hall of Worlds.
Here, exploration corporations, with vast numbers of scouts always searching the still unexplored reaches of the galaxy, took the findings of their far-flung searchers and placed not companies, not resources, but whole worlds, even whole solar systems, on the block. Buyers ranged from racial groups needing worlds to expand upon, to speculators betting on new finds, to interest groups looking to prove their own ideas of social or political systems by establishing colonies based on their particular values.
The Exchange really didn't care what you did on your own worlds, or how, or why, so long as you obeyed its few basic rules, recognized its extraterrestrial sovereignty, and had no truck with the Mycohl or the Mizlaplan except through the Exchange itself. But from these simple rules came a surprising level of control. The Exchange alone controlled an independent and mostly cymol and robotic interstellar military system; the Exchange alone settled disputes between companies or worlds that could not be settled between the principals. The Exchange alone controlled the interplanetary purse strings through its banks and trading houses. And the Exchange alone controlled the flow of discovery through its control of export patents and enforcements.
It also maintained a public consular corps on every world in the Empire to provide eyes and ears for the unseen Guardians, and a very private and very secret group known as the Special Corps, whose job it was to watch the watchers, find out what wasn't very public, and to find out what the Mycohl and Mizlaplan might be up to.
The humans who had attained some wealth and power within the Empire had done so by voluntarily serving in the consular, military, or Special Corps with distinction. They tended to be the best of their people, but, in a cutthroat society, just what they were best at was the subject of some argument.
Modra Stryke was one of the very few people who tended to look back on a nightmarish descent into hell with wistful nostalgia.
It had been a typical Exploiter Team contract: a new world discovered and purchased on speculation by an agricultural combine who wanted to know if their pig in a poke had reasonable potential as a new source of revenue.
The combine was the kind of employer only a Team like Lankur and Stryke would take -- one that would only pay off if they found something there and if the usual nasty surprises and cost estimates weren't outrageous.
Not that the contract didn't call for an ironclad payment no matter what; it was just that these kinds of jobs came with only enough front money to mount an expedition, and if you didn't come up with anything of value, you'd find that the corporation that hired you had all the substance of a soap bubble and would vanish just as fast. It was what First Teams always faced, and why only small private companies like theirs did First Team work. Strike it rich for an employer a few times and you'd have enough of a bankroll to establish yourself as a real company, with lots of ships and crews and resources, and forget your worries. The trick was to stay alive, pay the bills, and cover expenses until you did.
Few did.
Modra Stryke was a tall, attractive redhead with a strong face and voice and with too strong a romantic streak at twenty-four to "get into the baby business," as she referred to it. Having inherited a little money from a doting uncle who'd been an Exchange agent and had parlayed those connections into a small commodities trading company, she'd rejected the usual path of getting married and using the family business as a solid basis. It was too dull, too mundane, and too dead-ended for somebody like her, particularly at her age.
Instead she'd sold the business, left her native Caledon, and come to the capital of the Empire with dreams of romantic adventure and untold wealth still buzzing around her head from all the old stories she'd heard.
She hadn't been in the city three days when the Widowmaker had limped into port, barely functioning, its crew half dead and completely dead broke, a last gasp First Team that had run out its options. She'd gone down to see the ship just out of curiosity, and the same piece of broken-down junk that the spaceport yard had decided was fit only for scrap looked to her like the most amazing and romantic thing she'd ever seen.
And there was big, burly Tris Lankur, with full beard and curly black hair and flashing eyes, sparring with the dockmaster and threatening to fight off all comers if they tried to take his ship for back fees. He looked and acted exactly the part of the romantic spacefaring adventurer in all those stories and vidplays, and his crew, a motley batch of nonhuman creations with the same kind of madness in them, had been the perfect supporting cast. Modra had money but needed experience and a way in; they had, by the looks of them, plenty of experience but, between them, the crew of the Widowmaker didn't have cab fare. Lankur had taken one look at the tall, shapely redhead, listened to her offer, balked at the idea of taking her along, and finally made the deal.
She remembered it like it was yesterday, but it was actually nearly five years ago.
In that five years, taking First Team assignments, looking for the big one, she'd had the kinds of adventures that, while not at all the glamorous sort of things the glorified fictional versions promised, were certainly exciting, introducing her all too soon to the wonders of Exchange medical science. She'd repaired just about every sort of damage short of death, giving her all the experience she ever wanted or needed, but still she'd had very few jobs that really paid off, and none that paid off so great that they didn't have to do it anymore.
And, finally, it had been down to one last mission, pay off or forget it, on a world poetically named 2KBZ465W. A world that almost literally finished their saga . . .
Beautiful worlds were often like beautiful people -- all bloody and nasty-looking when you got under their skins.
Modra Stryke always hated to be first in on a new planet; first in often meant the first to die.
This place was so new they didn't even have a name for it yet, not officially, although already the forward exploiter team had a lot of names for it, none suitable for children.
No matter how good they made the environmental suits, they never had been able to get rid of the smell, she thought glumly. It didn't take many hours inside one, even with all the so-called filtrations and absorptions put into it, before you could smell your own fear-induced sweat and other body odors you never knew you had. The suits hadn't been developed for humans, necessarily, although this one was designed to her unique personal form and requirements. In spite of the fact that the dark-blue suit looked rubbery and skintight and left nothing of the wearer's form to the imagination, it was made of the toughest synthetics ever developed, able to withstand enormous ranges of heat and cold, cushion against most projectiles, even basic flash guns, and keep the wearer comfortable and cozy inside. You could even pee in your pants and some kind of suction would remove the waste, convert it to power, and leave you dry. She could attest to its efficiency there; she'd once been stuck in her suit for three days. It neatly got rid of and used everything -- but it couldn't get rid of the smell.
Attached to the suit was a lightweight helmet made out of a more rigid form of the same stuff. You hardly knew you had it on, but it could provide water and something that at least passed for food for several days.
She gave a mental command and instantly the dark, dank swamp she was trudging through changed from a place of darkness and foreboding into a riot of brilliant colors. She looked around but decided that infrared was impractical here, where even the water seemed alive, and switched it off again.
*"Ms? Where you at?" she called nervously, hoping her heavy breathing wouldn't betray her fear. Even now, after all this time, she still felt the amateur of the team, and that she was always under examination to see if she would fail.
"Forty meters to your left," Tris Lankur's voice came back to her, sounding far more distant than that. "Closing on I.P. Watch those long vines with the thick tendrils. They appear to have minds of their own and are looking for free samples."
She nodded, although she couldn't see the vines or him. 'I've already had to teach a few lessons. This place looks like midnight in Hell."
"I think it has a certain charm, myself," came a third voice, hollow-sounding, guttural, almost like someone using belches to speak. "My ancestral world probably looked no different except in the details."
"Yeah, well, that's why I never accept your invitations to visit your home world," she responded sarcastically.
"And I thought it was because you feared my intentions," the strange voice retorted. Biologically, the pair had about as much in common as they did with these trees.
"Where are you, Durquist? Still in the trees?" she called back.
"About twenty meters up and about fifty to your right," the creature responded. "The ecosystem of this world is fascinating. There is a veritable garden of totally different plants growing off the tops of these giant weeds."