"William C. Dietz - By Force of Arms" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dietz William)

geted too, and she needed to warn him. "I'll need a ship . ..
the fastest one you can find."

Booly smiled and dropped a robe over her shoulders.
"I'll put someone on it. In the meantime, you might want
to consider some clothes."

Thou shalt have no gods before me.

Holy Bible, Exodus 20:3
First printing circa 1400

Somewhere Beyond the Rim,
the Confederacy of Sentient
Beings

One moment they were there, thousands upon thousands
of shimmery spaceships, all seemingly motionless in space,
then they were gone, absorbed by the strange dimension
called "hyperspace," and launched toward a distant set of
coordinates.

The Sheen fleet was comprised of approximately 1,300
separate vessels, all controlled by the computer intelligence
known as the Hoon, and, with the exception of a human
named Jorley Jepp, a navcomp called Henry, and a robot
named Sam, was entirely crewed by nonsentient machines.

Not that Jorley Jepp and the AIs who attended him could
properly be referred to as "crew," since their actual status
hovered somewhere between "prisoner" and "stowaway."
A situation that Jepp sought to exploit, since he viewed
the fleet as the manifestation of Divine Providence and the
means by which to enact God's plan. Well, not God's plan,

BY FORCE OF ARMS 9

since it was difficult to know what that was, but his idea
of what God's plan should be.

All of which was fine with the Hoon so long as the
human continued to support the computer's overriding pur-
pose, which was to find the Thraki and eradicate them.
Why was anything but clear. Not to Jepp anyway. Still,
why worry about something when you can't do anything
about it?

The prospector cum messiah straightened his filthy ship
suit, stepped out onto the improvised stage, and raised his