"Keith Laumer - Bolos 9 - Bolo Strike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

them face to face, as it were."
Streicher felt a growing anger . . . or was it fear? An alien species
with a technology evolved along biological lines, rather than the
traditional methodologies of physics, chemistry, and math . . . their
arsenal might be expected to include impressive biological weapons. And
their conquests of other worlds would involve literally reshaping the
inhabitants of those worlds to meet the new masters' specifications.
Jon Jarred Streicher was a military man from a military family, but
his roots were on Aristotle and within the quasi-religious doctrine of
Ethical Eudaimonics . . . which stressed that each individual had the
right to develop his or her full potential through creativity, artistic
endeavor, and individuality. The greatest good for the greatest number.
The idea of an outside intelligence reshaping an entire world
population to its own ends . . . the very idea was disgusting.
And yet, he thought, no wonder the Caernan human population
reportedly thought of the Aetryx as "gods." The impulse to worship higher
powers might well be genetically enhanced or even grafted in whole.
But Moberly was still lecturing. "Confederation traders rediscovered
Caern five standard years ago," he went on. "The condition of the human
population on Caern was only gradually uncovered after several trading
settlements were established on the fringes of the Storm Sea."
As Moberly spoke, words and names overlaid the slow-turning
holographic globe, showing continents, cities, seas and other
geographical features. As would be expected for the moon of so large a
gas giant, Caern was tidally locked with its primary, one side forever
facing Dis, the other looking outward, toward the stars. Because Dis was
large enough to generate a fair amount of thermal radiation through
gravitational collapse, the Disward side of Caern was desert, while the
antipodes were ice-locked tundra, glacier, and solid-frozen ocean.
Between the two extremes was a chain of landlocked seas girdling the
planet from pole to pole. Rugged mountains had crinkled and gnarled the
planetary crust with fractal geometries too complex for the eye to follow.
Ice melt from mountains and outside glaciers had carved crazy-quilt
jumbles of canyons, rivers, and badlands, and active volcanoes glowed
and grumbled everywhere. Most of the citiesтАФthe old Concordiat
population centersтАФwere scattered along the seas and fertile plains
pinned between desert and ice.
Planetographic data scrolled through Streicher's inner awareness,
cold facts and figures inadequate to describe so vast and complex a thing
as a living world. Smaller than Earth, with a surface gravity only three
quarters of a G, and a low atmospheric pressure as well, .8 bar., Caern
circled Dis in four days and eight hours, rotating once in that time as it
faced its primary.
 Two suns crawled slowly across the Caernan sky through the long,
long day. With so much thermal energy falling on Caern both from the
stars and from Dis, storms were large, violent, and frequent, though the
slow rotation and small seas together meant that large Coriolis-induced
storms were nonexistent.
Local storms, though, could be fierce, sudden, and fast-moving, with
torrential downpours, tornadoes, and brick-sized hail. Thick ozone layers