"Peter F. Hamilton - Mindstar Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

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CHAPTER ONE

Meteorites fell through the night sky like a gentle sleet of iceflre, their sharp scintillations
slashing ebony
overload streaks across the image Greg Mandel's
photon amp was feeding into his optic nerves.
He was hanging below a Westland ghost wing, five hundred metres above the Purser's Hills, due west
of Kettering. Spiralling down. Wind strummed the membrane, producing near sublimina1 bass
harmonics.
Ground zero was a small crofter's cottage; walls of badly laid raw stone swamped with some olive-
green creeper, big scarlet flowers. It had a thatched roof, reeds rotting and congealing, caked in
tidemark ripples of blue-green fungal growths. A two-metre-square solar-cell strip had been pinned
on top.
Greg landed a hundred metres downslope from the cottage, propeller spinning furiously to kill his~
forward speed. He stopped inside three metres. The Westland was one of the best military
microlights ever built - lightweight, highly manoeuvrable, silent, with a low radar-visibility
profile. Greg had flown them on fifteen missions in Turkey, and their reliability had been one
hundred per cent. All British Army covert tactical squads had been equipped with them. He'd hate
to use anything else. They'd gone out of production when the People's Socialism Party caine to
power, twelve years previously. A victim of the demilitarization realignment programme, the Credit
Crash, the Warming, nationalization, industrial collapse. This one was fifteen years old, and
still functioned like a dream.
A time display flashed in the bottom right corner of the photon amp image, spectral yellow digits:
21:17:08. Greg twisted the Westland's retraction catch, and the translucent wing folded with a
graceful rustle. He anchored it with a skewer harpoon. There'd be no danger of it blowing away
PITIR F. HAMILTON
shot-gun down, resting its barrel on a stone, saving it from the mud. A man who knew weapons.
'OK, you can turn now.'
His face was thin, bearded, hazel eyes yellowed. He looked at Greg, taking in the matt-black
combat leathers, slim metallic-silver band bisecting his face, unwavering Waither. Edwards knew he
was going to die, but the terrified acceptance was flecked with puzzlement. 'Why?' he asked.
'Absolution.'
He didn't get it, they never did. His death was a duty, ordered by guilt.
Greg had learnt all about duty from the Army, relying on his squad mates, their equal dependence
on him, It was a bond closer than family, overriding everything - laws, conventions, morals.
Civvies like Edwards never understood. When all other human values had gone, shattered by
violence, there was still duty. The implicit trust of life. And Greg had failed Royan. Miserably.
Greg fired. Edwards' mouth gaped as the maser beam struck his temple, his eyes rolling up as he
fell forwards. He splashed into the thin layer of mud. Dead before he hit.
Greg holstered the Walther, breath hissing out between clenched teeth. He walked back down the
hill to the Westland without giving the body another glance. Behind him, the goat's bell began to
clang.


He refused to think about the kill while the Westland cruised over the countryside, his mind an
extension of the guido, iced silicon, confirming landmarks, telling his body when to shift
balance. It would've been too easy to brood in the ghost wing's isolated segment of the universe,