"Edmond Hamilton - The Star Hunters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

-Edmond Hamilton, 1949
 CHAPTER I
THE WRATH of the King of Orion flamed across the void.

Out from the Hyades sped his hunters, and from Mintaka, and Saiph and Aldebaran, grim ships of war
sped headlong between the stars in vengeful search for the small and secret ship that had dared violate
their domain.

The coded messages of anger and alarm flashed far away. And across the galaxy the star-empires heard,
and alertly watched their own frontiers. The Kingdom of Cassiopeia, the federated Barons of Hercules
who held a thousand suns and worlds, the Kings of Leo and Hydra and Draco, all these and a score of
smaller realms clear away to the Marches of Outer Space sent forth their fleets to watch, jealous of the
great empire of Orion, and more jealous still of the equally great and far older Terran Empire whose ship
it was that the hunters hunted.

The fleeing ship was a Class Five Scout of the Terran Navy, a tiny toy craft compared to the great
cruisers and heavies that pursued it. Its guns were popguns, it had hardly any armor, but it could go fast.
It was going very fast now, a mote of metal flying toward the Terran frontier. But, Hugh Mason knew
with fatal knowledge, it was not fast enough.

"We haven't got a prayer,тАЭ said Stack. Red-eyed and unshaven, he did not look like the captain of a
Scout as he stood with Mason behind the pilot in the little control room. He looked like a tramp.

"Those cruisers behind can't catch us,тАЭ said Mason.

"No, they can't,тАЭ said Stack. тАЬBut what about the ones ahead?

They'll be fanning out from Aldebaran right now."

Mason made no answer but his mouth tightened as he looked out the broad control-room window, the
window that was really a complicated scanner translating scrambled-up rays into ordinary light.

The light of a million stars beat upon him from the titanic panorama of stellar glare and cosmic gloom.
Amid the abyssal lamps of sapphire blue and diamond white and smoky orange there glowed like a
friendly beacon the whitish-green magnificence of Sirius, and beyond it the far yellow spark of Sol, old
capital of the Terran Empire and the fountainhead from which man had spread through the galaxy. But
closer and almost dead ahead was the blood-colored flare of Aldebaran, whose system was near the
limits of the Orionid Empire.

Mason had often wondered how this stupefying vista had looked to the first men who had gone out from
Sol to colonize the galaxy, thousands of years ago. Their frail star-ships had been borne out into the great
deeps by their courage and faith, their dream of a peopled galaxy living in peace under universal law. But
the dream had crumbled. One center of government could not hold the whole galaxy. The independent
kingdoms had sprung up, rejecting the authority of the Terran Empire, yet taking old Terran titles of
royalty for their chosen sovereigns. Oldest, biggest, was the Terran Empire that still would have no
sovereign except its elected Council. But others were almost as strong, and their kings yearned for
greater glory, like Janissar of Orion.

Thinking of that, Mason's hands clenched upon a stanchion. Between his teeth, he said,