"John Dalmas - The Three-Cornered War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

John Dalmas - The Three-Cornered War


THE THREE-CORNERED WAR
John Dalmas




This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real
people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1999 by John Dalmas
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereofin any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471
ISBN: 0-671-57783-2 Cover art by David Mattingly First printing, January 1999
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America




DEDICATION
To Gail, Judy, Jack, Jill, Ian, Ryan, and Kristen with love
Acknowledgments
Thanks are especially due to MARY JANE ENG, JIM GLASS, and JIM BURK, for
critiques of an early draft. And to the Spokane WORD WEAVERS for critiques of
several chapters.
To CHRIS O'HARRA, the honcho of Auntie's Bookstore, for her great and constant
encouragement of Spokane area writers.
And to ROBERTA RICE and her jolly crew at Dragon Tales, for their long and firm
support of science fiction authors at conventions throughout the inland Northwest.




Foreword
Twenty-one thousand years before this story, eight large shiploads of refugees fled a
vast war of destruction, an Armageddon in a distant part of the spiral arm.
They were wise enough to realize that being human, they carried with them the seeds of

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Jo...Dalmas%20-%20The%20Three-Cornered%20War.html (1 of 260) [10/31/2004 11:43:26 PM]
John Dalmas - The Three-Cornered War


future discords and war. And in an effort to avoid those wars becoming megawars, they
developed The Sacrament. This was a powerful system of pain-drug-hypnosis
conditioning for all the refugees, and for all their descendants forever. It was designed
to prevent scientific curiosity and investigation. They also stripped their ships'
computers of scientific and technological information that might lead to development of