"Douglas Hill - The Last Legionary 03 - Day Of The Starwind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hill Douglas)

Piper Edition 1989

ISDN 0 330 26652 7
 PART ONE



THE MYSTERY OF RILYN




PROLOGUE



Generations of peace had left the people of Jitrell unwary by nature. The planet was rich enough in
resources to be nearly self-sufficient, yet not so rich as to attract the greedy or the violent from elsewhere
among mankind's Inhabited Worlds. It was close enough to the main space lanes to profit from trade,
when it needed to, yet remote enough to be untroubled by turmoil and upheaval on other worlds.

It was just about right, according to its first colonists, when man had been spreading himself
among the stars in the centuries of the Scattering. life was good on Jitrell; life was comfortable. Perhaps
too comfortable...

Comfort was definitely uppermost in the minds of the spaceport guards in Belinter, the premier
city of Jitrell, in the middle of a balmy summer night. The guards were tending to lounge, to idle, to cluster
in groups and exchange murmured jokes and easy chat The port had not been busy for weeks, and was
nearly empty – except for two or three freighter ships whose cargoes had already been forwarded on
their long commercial journeys, and a few stacks of commodity containers behind the stout doors of
storage depots. Nothing much worth stealing; nothing much worth guarding.

So the guards were totally unprepared for the sight of their command post, with all their outgoing
communication systems, apparently beginning to collapse upon itself – as if struck by a giant, invisible
club – and then exploding in a thunderburst of flame and flying debris.

The guards were ordinary men, with only basic training, and they reacted like ordinary men. They
froze. Shock, bewilderment and fear blanked their minds, paralysed their limbs, for just long enough.

And the others were upon them.

They seemed to come from nowhere, as if the very shadows had given shape to them. Twenty or
more men, in dark red, one-piece uniforms, moving in a perfectly co-ordinated attack that was all the
more terrifying in its smooth speed and its eerie near-silence.

Some of the attackers rode light, two-man skimmers, hovering on a cushion of gases. Others
were on foot, as swift as predators, and as deadly. They came at the guards in a rush, while those on the