"Paul Di Filippo - Shipbreaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

Shipbreaker
by Paul Di Filippo

"If this was what death was, somebody ought to care."
тАФEarthblood, by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown

A craggy, jagged mountain fell slowly through the sky.

Attended by a flock of Class D Hagfish pilot ships, their coruscant supportive fields overlapping the
larger vessel, the dead hulk of another retired starliner descended toward the Shipbreakers' Yard on
Asperna. Possessing no discernible symmetry, the machicolated and turreted starcraft was a
conglomeration of protuberances and ports, pods and pavilions, so ugly it forced the viewer to concede
new notions of beauty. Its space-pitted, many-textured surfaces bespoke millennia of interstellar service.

Occulting Asperna's Least Sun, the dropping starliner robbed each individual in the crowd below of a
single shadow. Mainly composed of ragged workers, the crowd featured an isolated knot of the Yard's
management personnel. Apart from their finer clothing and lack of visible cruft, these overseers could also
be recognized by their attendant swarms of majestatics.

The workers and executives had arrayed themselves randomly along a wide sloping beach of
firm-packed sand, facing the water. On either extreme of the gathering lay vast hard-surfaced staging
areas for the upcoming deconstruction, dotted with tools and agravitic lifters and cradles which would
soon receive components gutted from the newest salvage prize. The shoreline was stained with exotic
industrial fluids that had killed off all vegetation and tinted in oily chromatics the waters themselves. At
several docks bobbed scores of dirty utilitarian slab-sided watercraft used to ferry workers out to the
ship-corpse, their lifting units deactivated.

Behind the onlookers stretched inland the nameless collection of hovels and shanties, shacks and
huts, warehouses and refectories, barrooms and brothels, laced together by muddy paths, all of which the
shipbreakers simply called home. At the very edge of the water and wading into the shallows, a vast
system of tall baffles and shuntsтАФa diamond labyrinthтАФstood poised to deal with the imminent surge that
would accompany the ponderous settling of the starliner into the sea.

Now the descent of the falling mountain and its host of attendants slowed even more dramatically.
The liner that had once cruised like a queen among the worlds of the Indrajal seemed to hover unmoving
in the atmosphere. But ever so timidly the Least Sun emerged crescentwise from behind its upper rim,
indicating a slight actual progress toward berthing.

The lower edge of the liner lipped the waves. The Hagfishes pulled their fields steadily upward from
contact with the rising water, not wishing to dissipate power by lifting cubic meters of sea needlessly. As
their fields shifted off the center of the big ship's mass, the little craft had to strain to maintain the
equilibrium of their prize. Soon, judging by the strobing moir├й patterns, they would have to let their
capture go.

When the ocean had swallowed the bottom third of the liner, a dark architectonic iceberg, the pilot
ships cut their fields entirely.

The resulting tidal surge whooshed shoreward, smashed the baffles, then dissipated in a chaos of
foam and spume and a noise like the manifestation of a deva.