"Jack Williamson - Eldren 1 - Lifeburst" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

Nightmare dreads swarmed like maddened males around her, haunting her back into awareness. Her
mass sacs had drained too fast. Her inner fires had grown too cold. She was too young, not yet fit for
all the fearful hazards she must overcome. She thought the star ahead might have no planets fit to feed
her brood. Some rival queen might get there first. Some native race might possess weapons not
recorded in the sagas.

The gas giants cheered her when she found them, until she came near enough to sense points of heat
far out in this new halo, most of them fixed but a few in motion almost as swift as her own. Enemy
princes, out of a hive she hadn’t seen, swarming to kill her?

Yet, whatever the hazards, her time was too near to let her turn back. There was no other star near
enough to reach before her flight sacs were altogether empty, before the fire metals cooled in her belly,
before she died, consumed by her own dying brood. Agony and terror spurred her on, until she could
sense sizes and make out shapes.

What she sensed killed her dread and edged her hunger. For these were no defending warriors.
Nesting on the snow-clumps of the halo, or sometimes in flight between them, these were tiny
creatures, strangely slow in flight and harmless as the idiot midges in the ballads of her hunter prince.

Some of them, surely, would be fat enough for food.




file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jack%20Williamson%20-%20Eldren%201%20-%20Lifeburst.html (16 of 285)10-12-2006 0:56:47
Jack Williamson - Eldren 1 - Lifeburst (v1.1)




Janoort. Ice haloid on inner fringe of Oort halo, 600 AU out from the Sun (600 times as far out as Earth is). A
mix of water, ammonia, and methane ices surrounding a heavier core formed of interstellar dust. Diameter, 129
kilometers: mean density, .9; surface gravity, 2 cm/sec²; day, 19.08 hours. Site of Halo Station.




1

«^»

THE LIFE OF THE STATION HUNG BY A KWANLON thread. So Kerry used to say. That thread
wound the master magnets in the fusion reactors that fought the interstellar cold. If it ever broke, there
would be no light or heat, no food, no air.

Yet Kerry seldom seemed to worry.

“Par Dios, we’ll hold out.” He used to grin at Quin, while he sniffed his hot-smelling starmist.