"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 7 - Bloodhype" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

influence had died off or perished in the storm. Its mental collapse was
hastened by hopelessness.

Now the Vom had plenty of time to reflect on its mistakes. It had used the
planet too thoroughly, scoured it too clean of life. The system had been
over employed. Enough should have been left to reproduce and maintain a


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reasonable ecosystem, for just such an emergency. But the Vom had glutted
itself thoroughly. Not a living cell had existed on the planet for a
thousand years. Great as it was, it could not create life.

So, one by one, the higher functions were shut down, lost, as the great
organic factory that was the Vom ran down, until only the barest flicker of
life remained.

One day?the Vom knew it was day because of the presence of solar energy?a
ship came down. It was not a large ship, being midway between courier and
destroyer classification. But it was quite well armed and very functional,
as were all the ships of the AAnn.

By rights the reptiles had no business in this part of space, on the
fringes of the Humanx Commonwealth. The immensity of nothingness, however,
made an excellent hiding place. Occasionally, daring scouts penetrated the
humanx patrol cordon in search of unexplored systems possessed of
exploitable resources?and sometimes on even less savory missions.

They nosed around, nowtimes finding something, nowtimes running afoul of a
Church patrol (and then there would be empty places in many nests), rarely
discovering something. All traveled without Empire sanction. Since by
treaty with the Commonwealth this was prohibited, all such activities were
of course quite illegal. However, since goods not traded for on a legal
footing were exempt from taxation, the rewards for the AAnn businessman who
backed a successful incursion were often enormous. In this respect the
Emperor indirectly condoned such actions.

Rockets flared at the base of the small vessel. Being a scout, it was
expected to have to land on planets not equipped with shuttle facilities.
This was as expensive as it was necessary. Naturally, it could not land on
interstellar drive (the AAnn equivalent of the advanced humanx KK drive
propulsive system). The gigantic artificial mass generated by a KK or
similar drive system could not impinge on the real mass of a planetary
surface without something giving. Matter caught in such a manner invariably
reacted. Violently. So ships used advanced shuttle?vessels to transfer
passengers and goods from the surface to orbiting ships. A scout could, in
effect, become its own shuttle.