"Daniel Keys Moran - Lord November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

radar; the maglev boost mechanism, and the projectiles themselves, had small amounts of metal in them,
but it was a chance he would have to take. Without the rifle the night face, if it was a night face, would kill
him.
His skin had been dark brown through most of the trek; it was the color Tyrel used socially. Now he
let his skin and hair go black, as black as the night around him. He kept to the forest floor, beneath the
trees, to cover that would help shield him from orbital observation. His follower was not tracking him by
any ordinary means; it barely knew how to keep to cover itself. Tyrel's best guess was that somewhere in
orbit, some commercial vehicle was watching him with very good optics. Infrared would do them no
good, not now; Tyrel kept his body temperature at the ambient for his surroundings. But motion analysis
is a powerful tool, and if they did not know where he was to within a kilometer at any given time Tyrel
would have been surprised.
The tree growth grew denser as he approached the river, became a broad ceiling that blocked the
sky. Tyrel took his time, working up the bluff, keeping to hard ground where possible; false dawn lit the
sky to the east when he had finally reached his spot. He waited patiently for the light, until he could see
the color of the bluff's stone clearly; a pale white, streaked here and there with the gray of granite. This
next was a risk, but a risk he would have to take; he let his skin and hair go pale, holding his hand out in
front of him until it came near to blending into the bluff. He kept his rifle, black and thereby far more
visible from the sky than he was, beneath him, and crept out, slowly, over the space of a tenth, across the
surface of the bluff until he had reached the spot he wanted, at the edge of a long stretch of stone, sloping
away down toward a drop of some eighty meters over the river below. A good spot; he would see
trouble coming from a distance.
Tyrel did not know the river's name; as the sun came up he saw that it ran broad, fast and shallow.
Freshwater fish glittered beneath its surface, quick and silver in the water. Tyrel lay on his stomach on the
cool stone, propped up on his elbows, with his rifle beneath him, hidden from the sky.
He slowed himself, brought his heart and breath down together until his heartbeat had reached ten per
minute, and his breaths five.
The rifle spat slivers of magnetized ceramic which fragmented upon impact into something about the
size of a man's fist. A hunting rifle; its variable speed maglev could be set for muzzle velocities low enough
to pot small game, and high enough to knock down a grizzly with one shot. Some of the other students
back at College had recommended Tyrel try a variable laser, but energy weapons are not common along
November's Dragonback mountains; Tyrel had stuck with a weapon he understood. He had been raised
among the poorest of November's people, the Dragonback Castille, and had been taught to hunt, with a
rifle not much different from the one he held now, before he had been taught to read.
Now, two decades after he had first been shown how to hold a rifle without getting smacked in the
face by it, the skill might well save his life.
The morning wore along slowly. The mist hung heavy in the air for the first brief while after sunrise.
Sol was cooler than Lucifer, November's star, even at the equator, and this far north was cooler still; but
it was warm enough to burn off the mist. Through the course of the long morning Tyrel waited patiently,
Sol's gentle light falling down upon him, warming the air he breathed.
Tyrel wished briefly that he'd thought to bring along imaging binoculars, but pushed the thought away
quickly. He had come to hike, to travel and learn the country; there had been no reason to expect
combat, or any sort of trouble. And there was no use wishing for things to be other than they were.
Toward mid-day he saw the first flicker of movement. Just a flicker, and then gone, something brown
and gray-green moving through the treeline, perhaps a kilometer downriver. It might have a bear or a
wolf or a deer, wild animals Tyrel had been told were common to these parts--but wild mammals, at
least, rarely use optical camouflage, and Tyrel, in the brief moment he had been able to see anything, had
seen the patch of brown and gray- green slide, like oil on the water.
Assume the person following him was a night face. Tyrel had enough to go on for that assumption. If
those who had hired his follower knew who he was, then they knew he had spent the last six years at the
College of United Earth Intelligence, studying nightways; and they would hardly send someone less