"Engines Of Light - 02 - Dark Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

hot-air balloon-trains lofting to cross the eastern barrier on the way to
Rawliston, dozens of other gliders patrolling the slopes or carrying urgent
messages and light freight from one town to another. A quick upward turn of his
head caught him a glimpse of a high, fast glint as one of the snake peopleТs
gravity skiffs, on some incomprehensibly urgent mission of its own, flashed
across the sky like a shooting star. The skiffs were a common sight, starships
rarer. Every few weeks a ship would follow the line of the Great Vale in a slow,
sloping descent to Rawliston; itТd be at an altitude of two kilometers when it
passed above the western end of the valley, down to a thousand meters by the
time it reached the other.
Swinging out of the updraught, he set the machine on the long descending
westward glide that would take him back to the launching-and-landing slope of
the airfield above his native town, Long Bridge. He was following the course of
Big River at a few hundred metersЧan altitude quite low enough for him to smell
the smoke from the kilns and see and hear children pointing and yelling at him
from each village he passed overЧwhen he heard a screaming from the sky to the
north and west. Stone looked up.
Something huge and black hurtled in a second from the zenith to behind the
hills, just ahead of him and to the left. Reflexively he closed his eyes,
flinching in expectation of a crash and an explosion.
None came.
He sent a quick and self-consciously futile prayer of thanks to the indifferent
gods and opened his eyes. What he saw made him almost shut them again. Behind
the brow of the mountain range a vast, ramshackle contraption was rising like a
malignant moon. Evidently the object seen falling, it moved forward, almost
scraping the summit. Lurching and yawing, it careened to above the middle of the
valley. Then it stopped, hanging in the air half a kilometer away, right in
front of him. It turned around.
The air crackled; Stone could feel every hair on his body prickle. He was still
rushing forward, on a collision course that in seconds would splatter him and
the glider across the front of the thing like a fly on goggles. He swung his
upper body forward and his legs up, and tipped the the bone levers to tilt the
glider into a dive. Down and down, he aimed for Big River, in the slim hope that
if he couldnТt pull out in time he might just survive a crash into water.
The shadow of the unidentified flying object passed over him. Something, not the
air and not his own efforts, slowed his descent, at the same time buffetting him
as though with invisible fists. He felt, incredulously, that he was actually
being lifted. Then the shadow and the strange lightness passed, and he began to
plummet again, but now he was able to pull back. At fifty meters above the river
he was in level flight, at a speed that a small and cautious upward flex on the
controls turned into a shallow climb.
The long bridge that had given the town its name whipped beneath his feet
likeЧso it seemedЧa just-missed trip wire. He banked leftward above the rooftops
of tile and thatch, slowing and spilling air as the field came into view, closer
and closer, he could see the blades of grass, and then he was down with a thump
that jarred every cartilage from his ankle joints to the top of his spine and
running, running faster than heТd ever run before, sprinting up the slope as
fast as a man running full pelt down it to take off, the glider still flying at
shoulder height and no weight at all, and then he could slow and finally stop.
He stood for a moment, unbuckling the harness and lifting the wing, then stepped