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

skilled than himself to kill him.
And if they did not know who he was, it was not likely they they would be following him in the first
place.
So a night face was probable. It would be in contact with the ship in orbit; which meant that it knew
by now that the ship had lost track of Tyrel.
It would be cautious. Moving slowly. They had time, and the night face might know it; Tyrel would
not be missed for several days, when he did not arrive at the first checkpoint on his itinerary.
Toward mid-afternoon Tyrel saw it again, the sliding patch of color moving through the trees toward
him. Closer this time--four hundred and fifty or sixty meters distant, Tyrel judged. Close enough to take a
shot if he got a good sighting.
The afternoon wore on and became evening, and night fell without Tyrel seeing anything further. He
dozed briefly, came awake to the sounds of distant birds in the night. Around midnight a wind came up,
and Tyrel had occasion to regret the spot he had chosen; the wind swept across the open face of the
bluff, and even at the height of summer it was chill enough it left Tyrel cold and stiff.
Morning again.
The second day passed without any suspicious movement that Tyrel saw.

On Tyrel's third day on the bluff, his sixth day since leaving Seattle, an aircraft passed overhead,
tracked across the high blue bowl of the sky for most of five minutes while Tyrel watched it. Too high up,
and moving too fast; Tyrel could have unloaded the entire magazine of his rifle in its direction without
being noticed. He was not considering leaving his position anyway; but again in the late afternoon he saw
motion in the forest. Further away this time; about seven hundred meters upstream of his position. That
was all he saw, motion; it might, this time, have been some wild creature.

The hunger was not bad; but by the end of his third day on the bluff Tyrel's thirst gnawed at him. He
could smell water and see it, but he could not go get it. Even as greatly as he had slowed himself, some
systems were beyond his control. His body fought to retain its fluids, but toxins built up regardless; before
dawn of the fourth day Tyrel pushed his metabolism back up, and crept slowly back under the cover of
the trees, letting his skin fade to black as he did so. He stood close to a tree and urinated against the
bark, slowly and quietly, until his bladder was empty, and then made his way back out to his chosen spot
before the sun had risen.
Tyrel knew himself well, and the systems of which he was composed, both those he could control and
those he could not; despite his thirst his systolic fluid levels were acceptable. He was two or three days
away yet from being unable to fight. He pushed back the first traces of real fear, and waited through the
long fourth day on the rock.

The fifth and sixth days came and went and Tyrel found himself growing lightheaded and dizzy. His
elbows throbbed where they rested against the stone, and his ribs, and the bones in his hips. At times he
found himself coming back to awareness, knowing that time had passed but not knowing how much. Sol
tracked slowly across the sky; Tyrel had time to appreciate the long line of genegineers, human and MI,
whose work had left him resistant to sunburn.
Fog crawled in before dawn on the seventh day, white and misty. Luna hung overhead, nearly full,
illuminating the banked wreaths of fog with an ethereal glow. Tyrel's skin grew damp; trickles of moisture
ran down across the broad muscles in his back, joined together and pooled like sweat in the small of his
back and the backs of his knees. The rock beneath him became slick. He imagined he saw shapes in the
moonlit fog, found his finger tightening on the trigger of his rifle, and forced himself to relax. Tired as he
was he found his skin tingling as though an electric current danced upon its surface. An absurd lightness
touched him, as though he might at any moment float weightless off the surface of the rock, up into the
cool night air. He could not feel the rifle in his hands, or the stone he lay upon, or himself.
...her eyes were as green as his own. He did not know her name, and had never met her before in his