"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

The New York cluster blocked a straight-line blink route into an area of
space, less crowded among the harshness. The blink routes took her
around the cluster and, the generator depleted, Mother was motionless in
space within optic range of a small grouping of stars that were huddled
together as if for company in a sort of cul-de-sac in space surrounded by
glittering oceans of old, huge, central core monsters.

The sac stars had families. One member of the planetary grouping of
the star nearest her came onto her view screen when she punched orders
into the computer. The world was one of several that had given mankind
the shivers for centuries.

Planets were not common enough to be ignored. Planets among the
dense star fields near the core, some 10,000 light-years from the U.P.
sector, were even more rare. Any ship coming into the sac would take a
close look at the world known as D.W. One, and would see one principal
reason why man had constructed huge fleets of ships and had armed them
with the most deadly weapons that technology could supply.

D.W. One, the first of the Dead Worlds to be encountered by a ship
coming in from the periphery, had been killed with a totality that belied
the difficulty of the feat.

Man could denude a planet of forests, eliminate thousands of animal
species, poison the atmosphere and the oceans with his wastes, but it was
pretty damned difficult to kill a planet and leave it intact. A planet buster
could fragment a world and leave nothing more than a belt of asteroids,
but what had been done to the Dead Worlds was even more impressive,
for D.W. One and several of her sister planets in the sac were dead from
the inside out. Although she was old, she should have had a molten core.
That she did not was one of the mysteries that had kept astrophysicists
guessing and caused all U.P. exploration ships to go armed. If the planet
killers ever came sweeping in from the vastness of space, man, so fragile in
his frame of bones, tendons, cartilage, and flesh, would need protection.
Thus, on Rimfire and on all other major ships of the X&A fleet there were
weapons that could fragment a world if necessary.

Once the planets in the sac had lived. Although there were no clues to
the identity of the race or races that had peopled the Dead Worlds,
unidentifiable rubble on the ravaged surface of D.W. One proved that
there had been a technological civilization there. Now even the top soil
was gone. The ground up nonbiodegradable debris of a technological
civilization was scattered over a surface that was nothing more than inert
rock. And into a flat, continent-sized area of the rock the killers, the race
that had destroyed twenty living planets, had carved a warning. The
message was not in words, but in symbols. An eye. A world, a stylized
building and other, more obscure images.

There was disagreement as to the exact words intended, but all of the