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

arms. Like the ship it was part of, the one-time storage
compartment was huge and stank of ozone.

Jepp's first convert, a nonsentient robot named Alpha,
sent a radio signal to more than a thousand of his peers.
All of them bowed their heads. It was more dignified than


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the shouts of adulation that Jepp had required of them the
month before. He was pleased and the sermon began.

The world called Long Jump was pleasant by human stan-
dards, having only slightly more gravity than Earth did,
plus a breathable atmosphere, a nice large ocean, and
plenty of raw unsettled land. Real estate, which like vacant
lots everywhere, was available for a reason.

This was partly due to the fact that Long Jump was not
only on the Rim, but on the outer edge of the rim, which
meant that goods such as grain, refined ore, and manufac-
tured products would have to be shipped to the center of
the Confederacy where they would be forced to compete
with similar commodities that were more expensive to pro-
duce, but had a shorter distance to travel. A competitive
reality that the citizens of Long Jump had never managed
to compensate for.

All of which helped to explain why Fortuna, the only
city of any real size, was home to thieves, prospectors,
renegades, bounty hunters, organ jackers, drug smugglers,
stave traders and every other sort of villain known to the
broad array of sentient races.

10 Wilfiam C. Dietz

It was like so many frontier towns, a city of contrasts
in which mansions stood shoulder to shoulder with sleaze-
bag hotels, animals toiled next to jury-rigged robots and
the often muddy streets wandered where commerce took
them.

But Fortuna wcis civilized, and, like mostly human civ-
ilizations everywhere, was host to a complex social struc-
ture. The very top layer of this society was occupied by
three different beings, all of whom liked to think that they
owned the very top slot, although none of them really did.