"William M. Gear - A Relic of the Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gear W Michael)

Now he'd see.
The ship slowed to a stop over the spire he'd just left.
"Can you hear me, Rich Mann?"
Mann nodded gloomily to himself. Definitely, that was it.
"I should have tried this before. Since you're nowhere in sight, you've either left the vicinity altogether or you're hiding in the thick bushes around those towers."
Should he try to keep dodging from spire to spire? Or could he outfly them?
At least one was bound to be faster. The armor increased his weight.
"I hope you took the opportunity to examine this tower. It's fascinating. Very smooth, stony surface, except at the top. A perfect cone, also except at the top. You listening? The tip of this thing swells from an eight-foot neck into an egg-shaped knob fifteen feet across. The knob isn't polished as smooth as the rest of it. Vaguely reminiscent of an asparagus spear, wouldn't you say?"
Richard Schultz-Mann cocked his head, tasting an idea. He unscrewed his helmet, ripped out and pocketed the radio. In frantic haste he began ripping out double handfuls of the yellow moss/wool, stuffed them into a wad in the helmet, and turned his lighter on it. At first the vegetation merely smoldered, while Mann muttered through clenched teeth. Then it caught with a weak blue smokeless flame. Mann placed his helmet in a mossy nest, setting it so it would not tip over and spill its burning contents.
"I'd have said a phallic symbol, myself. What do you think, Rich Mann? If these are phallic symbols, they're pretty well distorted. Humanoid but not human, you might say."
The pirates had joined their ship. They hovered around its floating silver bulk, ready to drop on him when the Puppet Master's infrared detectors found him.
Mann streaked away to the west on full acceleration, staying as low as he dared. The spire would shield him for a minute or so, and then...
"This vegetation isn't stage trees, Rich Mann. It looks like some sort of grass from here. Must need something in the rock they made these erections out of. Mph. No hot spots. You're not down there after all. Well, we try the next one."
Behind him, in the moments when he dared look back, Mann saw the Puppet Master move to cover the second spire, the one he'd left a moment ago, the one with a gray streak in the moss at its base. Four humanoid dots clustered loosely above the ship.
"Peekaboo," came the Jinxian's voice. "And good-bye, killer."
The Puppet Master's fusion drive went on. Fusion flame lashed Out in a blue-white spear, played down the side of the pillar and into the moss/wool below. Mann faced forward and concentrated on flying. He felt neither elation nor pity, but only disgust. The Jinxian was a fool after all. He'd seen no life on Mira Ceti-T but for the stage trees, He had Mann's word that there was none. Couldn't he reach the obvious conclusion? Perhaps the moss/wool had fooled him. It certainly did -look like yellow moss, clustering around the spires as if it needed some chemical element in the stone.
A glance back told him that the pirate ship was still spraying white flame over the spire and the foliage below.
He'd have been a cinder by now. The Jinxian must want him extremely dead. Well-
The spire went all at once. It sat on the lavender plain in a hemisphere of multicolored fire, engulfing the other spires and the Jinxian ship; and then it began to expand and rise. Mann adjusted his attitude to vertical to get away from the ground. A moment later the shock wave slammed into him and blew him tumbling over the desert.
Two white ropes of smoke rose straight up through the dimming explosion cloud. The other spires were taking off while still green! Fire must have reached the foliage at their bases.
Mann watched them go with his head thrown back and his body curiously loose in the vacuum armor. His expression was strangely contented. At these times he could forget himself and his ambitions in the contemplation of immortality.
Two, knots formed - simultaneously in the rising smoke trails. Second stage on. They rose very fast now.
"Rich Mann."
Mann flicked his transmitter on. "You'd live through anything."
"Not I. I can't feel anything below my shoulders. Listen, Rich Mann, I'll trade secrets with you. What happened?"
"The big towers are stage trees."
"Uh?" Half question, half an expression of agony.
"A stage tree has two life cycles. One is the bush, the other is the big multistage form." Mann talked fast, fearful of losing his audience. "The forms alternate. A stage tree seed lands on a planet and grows into a bush. Later there are lots of bushes. When a seed hits a particularly fertile spot, it grows into a multistage form. You still there?"
"Yuh."
"In the big form the living part is the tap root and the photosynthetic organs around the base. That way the rocket section doesn't have to carry so much weight. It grows straight up out of the living part, but it's as dead as the center of an oak except for the seed at the top. When it's ripe, the rocket takes off. Usually it'll reach terminal velocity for the system it's in. Kidd, I can't see your ship; I'll have to wait till the smoke-"
"Just keep talking."
"I'd like to help."
"Too late. Keep talking."
"I've tracked the stage trees across twenty light-years of space. God knows where they started. They're all through the systems around here. The seed pods spend hundreds of thousands of years in space; and when they enter a system, they explode. If there's a habitable world, one seed is bound to hit it. If there isn't, there's lots more pods where that one came from. It's immortality, Captain Kidd. This one plant has traveled farther than mankind, and it's much older. A billion and a-"
"Mann."
"Yah."
"Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. I don't know its name on the star charts. Shall I repeat that?"
Mann forgot the stage trees. "Better repeat it."
"Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nothing. Hunt in that area till you find it. It's a red giant, undersized. Planet is small, dense, no moon."
"Got it."
"You're stupid if you use it. You'll have the same luck I did. That's why I told you."
"I'll use blackmail."
"They'll kill you. Otherwise I wouldn't have said. Why'd you kill me, Rich Mann?"
"I didn't like your remarks about my beard. Never Insult a Wunderlander's asymmetric beard, Captain Kidd."
"I won't do it again."
"I'd like to help." Mann peered into the billowing smoke. Now it was a black pillar tinged at the edges by the twin sunlight. "Still can't see your ship."
"You will in a moment."
The pirate moaned . . . and Mann saw the ship. He managed to turn his head in time to save his eyes.