"Mark S. Geston - The Allies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Geston Mark S)

We encountered more planetary systems as we traveled up the arm of the galaxy,
toward the central disk. Against all predictive odds, none were sufficiently
like home to offer any refuge. Where there was life, it was utterly foreign to
us. Many began asking where, if the universe was so inhospitable, the enemy had
come from. Could it be that out of all the stars, there were only our world and
theirs, and we were therefore destined to contest the two places?

All the while, the Minds would regularly tell me that another fraction of the
passengers and crew would have to be awakened to avoid irreversible damage.

The Ship responded splendidly to this growing burden. The efficiencies of the
production and recycling units far exceeded their designers' expectations. We
lived, crowded shoulder to shoulder as the Ship's kilometers of galleries and
halls filled up with people who had nothing much to talk about and even less to
do.

We endured three subjective years like this. Sixty-one planetary systems were
investigated and found unsuitable. On one, we detected the remains of an enemy
outpost that had been destroyed by earthquake and corrosive gas an objective
century before our arrival.

I let a party of a thousand people descend to another after they had nearly
threatened mutiny if they were not allowed to leave. It required a subjective
week to disassemble the quantum dimensions and descend into the prevalent
reality. We lost contact with them during their first night on the ground.
Orbital reconnaissance the next day could not find any evidence they had ever
been there, and it was only after two objective days of analysis that the Minds
and I were able to guess at what had happened, and then, of course, we dared not
share it with anyone. I took the Ship away and spent four days reassembling the
quantum dimensions so we could resume our travel.

I was therefore not at all surprised when they began asking to go home. I
naturally refused at first, but the requests became more insistent as we
reconnoitered one uninhabitable star system after another. I sympathized with
them and would have consented for I myself, was losing the desire to go on if I
could not be alone again. But I could not because returning would mean failure
and extinction.

Only a hundred thousand people remained asleep by this point and the Minds were
unanimous that their lives would be threatened as the others' had been if they
were not awakened. There was also .doting and belligerence among the waking and
the Ship's security systems were having trouble avoiding injuries. I consulted
the Minds and shared my indecision with them. They reassuringly told me that it
was nothing extraordinary "given the circumstances," but that it did present me
with two choices that at least had to be considered. First, I could preserve
order and make the Ship habitable for up to eight subjective centuries if I
liquidated all but eight thousand people.

"Liquidate?" I wanted to hear them say it plainly, to implicate them in what I
had already privately considered.