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

correct.
YES, said the Bastard, perhaps guessing Bodhi's guess; she knew him well. WHOEVER DID THIS
CAME A LONG WAY FOR IT. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GALAXY.
PERHAPS, said Bodhi. OR PERHAPS THEY JUST WANT US TO THINK SO. LET'S
PROCEED INSYSTEM FOR NOW. WE STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENED TO
UGLY.
InSystem, a small Marslike planet, Ugly-On-A-Ball, orbited Devnet itself at a distance of one
hundred and sixty-five million kilometers. Three centuries of terraforming had not changed Ugly much.
The air was breathable by humans, but just barely; the House of November had come to Devnet System
for its Gates, not out of any interest in its real estate.
That he had found himself heading generally inSystem pleased Bodhi; the odds had been somewhat
against it. The November Guard had been unable to tell Bodhi exactly what direction Devnet's First Gate
faced; under ordinary circumstances, when craft entered or left the Gate at only a few hundred kilometers
per hour, it was hardly relevant. (A desperate search through those ship's logs the House of November
had been able to get hold of, of ships that had transited Devnet's First Gate in the last few decades, had
produced nothing; it was not the sort of information that got recorded.)
Aside from the ninety-nine mirrors, the System might never have been visited by intelligence. The
Shivering Bastard monitored no radio, no video, no net; saw no ships. Bodhi sat cross-legged in free
fall, in loose clothing that drifted around him. In a crystal bubble, surrounded by a bright starry sky, he
ghosted through a System gone silent.
Bodhisatva's thoughts were troubled. The tech necessary to mount mirrors of this size and number,
across the full length of a solar system, in the brief time since Devnet had fallen silent, was beyond
anything in his experience. He doubted the sleem, humanity's foes since its discovery of the tachyon star
drive, could have done it. Once perhaps, at the height of their power-- but not today, broken and
scattered as they were across the galaxy.
He consulted the Alternities Catalog of Intelligent Spacegoing Species, and came up with only a
few possibilities; none he liked. The Zaradin Church perhaps had the capability--and Bodhi's distrust of
the Zaradin Church ran deep--but it would be wildly out of character. Even if it did not drag them into a
general war with humanity, an act like this would make human governments even more unfriendly to the
Church than they already were, if that was possible. The Tamranni were a possibility of sorts--but there
were Tamranni upon November itself, and while Bodhi presumed that the ancient Tamranni could have
done such a thing as he saw before him, he doubted very much that they would have. One of the older
and larger Platformer Caravans rounded out Bodhi's short list of possibles; and again he thought it
unlikely. Though a given Caravan might have managed to set these mirrors, all the Caravans humanity had
ever encountered, taken together, could not have survived war with the mighty House of November--
--and whoever did this, thought Bodhi with a certain grim weariness, is going to have to.
Unlike planets, Gates are relatively stationary with respect to the stars to which they are anchored; by
a quirk of timing, Ugly's orbit had taken it to the side of Devnet almost directly opposite its First Gate.
The Shivering Bastard climbed up above the ecliptic and aimed its telescopes in the direction of Ugly. It
took the Bastard a moment to find the planet, even knowing where it was supposed to be; Devnet's First
Gate is 8.3 light hours distant from Devnet itself, nine billion kilometers distant.
Ugly was a molten rock.
Bodhi exhaled slowly. That he had expected it did not make seeing it any easier. At the distance, all
that was visible was the planet's heat signature, but that was sufficient; the planet radiated into space at a
temperature of 2,500 degrees Centigrade. It had never had much of an atmosphere, and now had none.
Ugly it might have been; but within the last ninety days, less than a quarter past, thirty-four million
Novembri, human and otherwise, had been alive upon its surface.
WE'VE BEEN NOTICED, the Bastard announced.
Bodhi did not stir; the image from the scope still trained upon the unguarded Third Gate came alive in
his awareness. Five craft, of a design unfamiliar to Bodhi, boosted from the Third Gate, chasing the