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

sufficiently to be habitable again, and the Vartosi colonized them. The result was an
interstellar imperium calling itself the Karghanik Empire.
Exploration had found no further habitable planets in their sector. Their religion
accounted for this peculiarity as the will of God—the same God they believed forbade
birth control.
Eventually, the worlds of the Empire grew seriously overpopulated. Finally one of its
planets, Klestron, sent an expedition years beyond known space. There it encountered
and skirmished with the alien Garthids. Later the expedition discovered and took
possession of a very minor "trade world" on the periphery of the Confederation. Within
months, however, they were driven from it.
But the expedition had broken the ignorance of both human sectors by whetting the
appetite of the Empire, while pressing the Confederation to accelerate change.
And disturbing Garthid isolation.




Prologue
More than two hundred parsecs from Iryala, two figures stood on a high balcony of the
Garthid imperial palace. Over the previous eighteen millennia, it had been built,
damaged by internecine wars, rebuilt and expanded. All without basic change. It was
far more than the imperial residence. It housed and officed the central executive
function overseeing a loose khanate of fifty-three inhabited worlds. There was no
compelling need for its centralization on a single site. Garthid electronics and

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John Dalmas - The Three-Cornered War


cybernetics were highly advanced. But the palace suited the Garthid psyche.
The seven-sided wall enclosing it was more than six miles around, and tall beyond
need, yet the structures it enclosed rose high above it, an intricately interconnecting
complex of buildings, courtyards, jumbled roofs and high-vaulting towers, often
irregularly stacked. There were arching walkways, some open, some enclosed. Turrets,
landing platforms for floaters and shuttles, and innumerable and often unlikely
balconies, large and small, partly in lieu of adequate windows. The architecture was
more intricate and extreme than any Gothic cathedral, and far less orderly. Yet
somehow stark, brooding, powerful. Nowhere was there a glint of silver, gleamstone,
gilt, or even copper. The structures were black—hardsteel and poured blackstone—
nonreflective as a military gunbarrel. The tall narrow windows were deep-set, of dark-
tinted glass.
It was considered the most beautiful architecture in the Garthid Khanate.
The country surrounding it was a broad, tree-spotted grassland, broken by swales,
shrubby knolls, and forested flood plains. Tradition called it the home of the species—
a sort of racial shrine. Its local climate and ecology were as little changed over the
millennia as Garthid science could keep them. The Garthids, even those whose families
had dwelt for millennia on other worlds, felt a powerful, a compelling attachment to it.
Garthid racial memory insisted that the species had evolved on that plain, lived and
scavenged there. There or in a region and climate much like it. A savage Eden where
predators large and predators fleet had struck down or pulled down hoofed prey. Often