"Michael Flynn - Wreck of The Rivers of Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flynn Michael)

The End

The First Wrangler

Epilogue: The Ship

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Prelude: The Ship
They called herThe River of Stars and she spread her superconducting sails to the solar wind in 2051.
She must have made a glorious sight then: her fuselage new and gleaming, her sails shimmering in a
rainbow aurora, her white-gloved crew sharply creased in black-and-silver uniforms, her passengers rich
and deliciously decadent. There were morphy stars and jeweled matriarchs, sports heroes and prostitutes,
gangsters and geeks andsoi-disant royalty. Those were the glamour years, when magsails ruled the skies,
andThe River of Stars was the grandest and most glorious of that beautiful fleet.

But the glory years faded fast. Coltraine was still her captain when the luxury trade dried up and the


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throngs of the rich and famous slowed from a torrent to a trickle, and even those who still craved the
experience could see that it was no longer the fashionable thing to do. But as he told Toledo when he
handed her the command, the luxury trade had been doomed from the start. Sex and vice and decadence
were more safely found earthside. There were yet honorableтАФif more quotidianтАФpursuits for a ship
with such wings to her.

Mars was the happening place back then. Adventurers, sand-kings, neтАЩer-do-wells, terraformers, second
sons, bawdy girls, and zeppelin pilotsтАФMars sucked them in, broke some and spat others out. Even
crewmembers would sometimes cash out on reaching Mars and head for the gaudy enticements of Port
Rosario. тАЬSome of them struck it rich,тАЭ the old song had it,

тАЬAnd some of them Mars struck dead

And some showed up in the hiring hall,

Begging their old berths back.тАЭ

Toledo and, later, Johnson and Fu-hsi carried hopes outbound and the shattered fragments back. There
was a raw energy to the age that tired old Earth hadnтАЩt seen since the taming of LEO during the Terrible
Teens, andThe River took greater pride in pushing the frontier out than she ever had in stroking the rich
and famous.

It was the Farnsworth engine that finally brought her low. Fu-hsi saw it coming and resigned, the only
one of her captains ever to do so; and so it fell to Terranova to see the once proud vessel humiliated.
Magnetic sails had ruled space for forty years, andThe River of Stars for almost twenty of them, but
Farnsworth engines made the Jovian moons the new frontier. The Luna-Ganymede Race went down in
history, and the magnetic sail went down to the fusion thruster. Terranova should never have taken the