"Emil Petaja - The Stolen Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

fire sparks As the red drop quick descended And a gap gleamed forth in heaven.”
Kalevala: Runo XLVII


I
^»
The manship dropped into the seething darkness like a predatory fish. This alien-made dark
was as virulent as it was viscuous; it brought corrosive death to anything less than a manship
Destroyer of the Terran Deep Fleet, with its heavy coat of force field armor that deflected the
planet’s lethal triple-shield.
“Go, Lady!”

Warily now, Lady sent out invisible probes to lick out into the stygian dark for Mephiti
ships. Wayne Panu’s eyes were her eyes, hers his.

“So far, so good, your Lady-ship!” Wayne’s mind stroked hers but joined her in a tight
watchfulness.

“Too close to light,” Lady pontificated out of her tapes. “Mephiti detest all light and sound.
That’s why it is impossible for us to communicate, why we keep losing ships. Even the
reflected absorbed light we can’t see, from stored energy and released energy, offends the
Mephiti. So—they kill us out of fear.”

“Or we kill them,” Wayne said grimly. “The first thing we knew about them was losing a
big wedge of Fleet ships in some black goop we couldn’t see. Can’t detect them by sound,
either. The bases of their ecology is completely alien. If it wasn’t for the smell—”

“They are gaseous, obviously. Yet they are highly sophisticated and cunning. As far as our
scientists have been able to deduce they evolved by skips and jumps straight out of N.C.C.
6720 itself, before it started to become a planetary nebula.”

Wayne made a rough noise. “Deep Fleet had some very desirable real estate all pegged out
in this sector of Orion, what with a few million hopeful colonists… Then we slammed into one
of these seething nightmare pockets. Two. Ten. A hundred. Their own roving colonies travel
within these semi-solid shields until they reach a planet they want, then they spread the black
goop all over it and take it from under our noses. Naturally we weren’t happy about this
invasion, and the war was on. But what a war! If it wasn’t that the Mephiti smell so bad—”
 “We have concluded that odor is their means of communication. When we tried to get close
enough for the usual sight or sound symbols, trying to make contact, we got killed for our
pains. And they are multiplying fast, oozing in from God-knows-where. Finally we were able to
design our manships to be both sightless and soundless, like us.”

“I keep pointing out,” Wayne grumbled, “that the Mephiti stink to high heaven.”

“To Terran noses, yes. But this is their attempt to communicate with us, warn us away.
Doubtless, like us, they need elbow room and new resources. They presume to take over
planets we had claimed for ours, shrouding each one they take with a protective shield like this
and—”

Wayne gave Lady her head; he had to. Once her micro-tapes were triggered off she was