"James P. Hogan - Giants 3 - Giant's Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

suggested part of whatever place the view was being captured from-a spacecraft of some kind. He
was aboard a spacecraft watching something approaching on a screen, and he had been there before.
The object continued to enlarge, but even before it became recognizable he knew what it
was: It was the Shapieron. He had gone back almost a year in time and was back inside the command
center of Jupiter Five watching the arrival of the Shapieron as he had been when it first
reappeared over Ganymede. He had watched this sequence replayed from UNSA's archives many times
since then and knew every detail of what was coming next. The ship slowed gradually and maneuvered
to come to relative rest standing five miles off in parallel orbit, swinging around to present a
side view of the graceful curves of its half-mile length of astronautic engineering.
And then something happened that he was completely unprepared for. Another object, moving
fast and blazing white at the tail, curved into the scene from one side, passed close by the
Shapieron's nose, and exploded in a huge flash a short distance be
yond. Hunt stared at it, stunned. That wasn't the way it had happened.
And then a voice sounded from the screen-an American voice, speaking in the clipped tones
of the military. "Warning missile launched. Attack salvo primed and locked on target. T-beams
being directed in near-miss pattern, and destroyers moving in to take up close-escort formation.
Orders are to fire for effect if alien attempts evasion."
Hunt shook his head and looked wildly from side to side, but the shadow figures around him
paid no heed to his presence. "No!" he shouted. "It wasn't like that! This is all wrong!" The
shadows remained heedless.
On the screen a flotilla of black, sinister-looking vessels moved into view from all
directions to take up position around the Ganymean starship. "Alien is responding," the voice
announced neutrally. "Commencing descent into parking orbit."
Hunt shouted out again in protest and leaped forward, at the same time wheeling around to
appeal for a response from the shadow figures. But they had gone. The command center had gone. All
of Jupiter Five had gone.
He was looking down on a huddle of metal domes and buildings standing beside a line of
Vega ferries amid an icy wilderness that lay naked beneath the stars. It was Main Base on the
surface of Ganymede. And on an open area to one side of the complex, dwarfing the Vegas behind,
stood the awesome tower of the Shapieron. He had advanced by several days and was witnessing again
the moment when the ship had just landed.
But instead of the simple but touching welcoming scene that he remembered, he saw a column
of forlorn Ganymeans being herded across the ice from their ship between lines of impassive,
heavily armed combat troops, under the muzzles of heavy weapons being trained from armored
vehicles positioned farther back. And the base itself had acquired defense works, weapons
emplacements, missile batteries, and all kinds of things that had never existed. It was insane.
He couldn't tell whether he was inside one of the domes and looking out over the scene as
he had been at the time, or whether he was somehow floating disembodied at some other viewpoint.
Again his immediate surroundings were indistinct. He swung around, moving in a dreamlike way in
which his body had lost its
substance, and found that he was alone. Even surrounded by ice and endless empty space he
felt clammy and claustrophobic. The terror that had gripped him when he first stepped out of the
alien vessel was still there, gnawing insistently and stripping away his powers of reason. "What
is this?" he demanded in a voice that choked somewhere at the back of his throat. "I don't
understand. What does this mean?"
"You don't remember?" the voice boomed deafeningly from nowhere and everywhere.
Hunt looked wildly in every direction, but there was nobody. "Remember what?" he
whispered. "I remember none of this."