"Frank Herbert - Destination Void 4 The Ascenscion Factor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest. . . .

-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Vashon Literature Repository


Jephtha Twain suffered the most exquisite pain for three days, and that was the point. The
Warrior's Union thugs were professionals, if he passed out he simply wasted their time. In his
three days at their hands he had never passed out. They knew that he was no good to them right
from the start. The rest of his agony had been the penalty he paid for wasting their time. When


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they were through tormenting him at last they hooked him up, as he knew they would, to the
obsidian cliff below the high reaches. Subversives were often hooked up to die in full view of
the settlement as a lesson -- the exact meaning of the lesson was never clear.

The three from the Warrior's Union hooked him up there in the dark, as they'd taken him in the
dark, and Jephtha thought them cowards for this. His left eyelid was less swollen than the right,
and he managed to work it open. A pale hint of dawn pried the starry sky away from the black
cheek of the sea. Predawn lights of a commuter ferry wallowed at the dark dockside down below him
in the settlement. Like the rest, it loaded up the shift changes of workers at Project Voidship.

Running lights from the submersible ferries flickered the night sea's blackness all the way from
the settlement at Kalaloch out to the project's launch tower complex. A maze of organic dikes and
rock jetties fanned out both up- and downcoast of Kalaloch, supporting the new aquaculture
projects of Merman Mercantile, none of which had hired Jephtha after his fishing gear had been
seized and his license revoked. His partner had kept a couple of fish for himself instead of
registering them dockside. The Director's "new economy" prohibited this, and the Director's
henchmen made a lesson of the both of them.

Under the opening sky of morning Jephtha felt himself lighten, then separate from his body. He
peeled the pain from himself, his self wriggling free of its wounded skin like a molted skreet,
and watched the sagging wretch of his flesh from atop a boulder a couple of meters away. This far
south, Pandora's days lasted nearly fourteen hours. He wondered how many more breaths he had left
in his sack of cracked ribs and pain.

Marica, he thought, my Marica and our three little wots. The Warrior's Union said they'd hunt
them down, too. . . .

They would think maybe she had something to tell. They would claim that his woman and their three
little ones were dangerous, subversive. They would start on the children to make her talk and she
could say nothing, she knew nothing. Jephtha squeezed his good eye closed against his blood and
shame.

The Director's "special squad" of the Warrior's Union had pierced Jephtha's chest and back with
maki hooks, steel fishhooks with a cruel incurve the size of his thumb. They caught the glimmer
of fresh daylight like armor across his chest. The steel snaffles and cable leaders hung to his