"John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

trek in the Snowy Range Preserve, when the first
punch hit. Bubba was the first to notice. At that
point, all that the rest of us noticed was Bubba. His
big wolf's head raised, alert, attention fixed,
looking off west.

*A parsec equals 3.258 light-years.

Deneen, my sister, put down the seared hind leg of a
burrow pig. "What is it, Bubba?" she asked.

He didn't make a sound; didn't look at her. His
attention was all on what he heard, or maybe what he
was receiving telepathically.

Then the rest of us began to hear it, too. It was so
low-pitched, it was as if we felt it before we heard
it-a deep bass thrumming, barely audible. Yet somehow
it seemed very loud-loud but far away. Uncle Piet and
Bubba got to their feet, the rest of us a half second
behind, and we all trotted through the trees to the
edge of the cliff a hundred feet away. From there we
could see southward across the foothills, toward the
Valrith Plain.

"So it's happened," Piet said softly, as if talking
to himself.

What we'd heard was a Federation battleship. Make
that an Imperial battleship-things had changed. I
stood there in my moccasins, staring. It must have
been more than a quarter mile long, cruising across
the clear morning sky two miles or so above the
foothills, and maybe three miles south. It answered a
question we'd been talking about a few days earlier.
"Let's go home," Piet said.

It took us very little time to break camp and leave,
all without conversation. We had almost nothing to
carry-no sleeping bags, no cooking gear, no tent.
Each of us, except Bubba of course, carried a small
blanket, a heavy belt knife, a spark wheel for
starting fires, a tinder box, a sharpening stone, a
self-made backpack, woven at Piet's instructions from
the inner bark of a tree, and a water bag made the
previous butchering season from the boiled-out gut of
a fatbuck. We were being as primitive as we knew
how-or as Piet knew how.

I doused the fire with a minimum of water-it was a