"A Peripheral Affair" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

A Peripheral Affair

George R. R. Martin




Copyright й1973 by George R. R. Martin

First published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1973



Out on the periphery, where the human worlds grew few and far between, a spider's web stretched between the stars.

It was an old web, its strands heavy with stardust. The spiders that patrolled it were fat and rusty, and it had been nearly fifty years since last a fly was snared. But still the web endured, though it had long outlived its purpose.

The worlds the web entwined still bore witness to that purpose, still wore the radioactive scars that told of the ancient struggle that had seared through the Periphery. It had been there, a century earlier, that the expanding globe of the Allied Starsuns of Terra had first come into contact with the rival empire that called itself the KwanDellan BrotherWorlds. It had been there that the long, bitter KwanDellan War had been foughtЧto no conclusion.

The web had been spun in the uneasy armed peace that came in the wake of that war. Amid a chaotic jumble of Alliance worlds and independent colonies and the home planets of a dozen alien species, the starspiders wove a complex network to catch KwanDellan flies.

The web spinners were the scouts, the swift, lightly armed three-man scouts. They were the smallest starships of all. But they were not small. Each was a quarter-mile long, its decks crammed with sophisticated sensing equipment. In the early days, more than 200 of them prowled the Periphery.

The spiders were the heavier ships, the cruisers and the battlewagons and the dreadnoughts. They were far fewer in number, but they carried the sting. Should a KwanDellan warship venture into the starweb, it would be they who caught and slew it.

But, for fifty years, there had been no warships to slay.

The hostile peace had lasted only a decade. There are many directions in space, and the region called the Periphery was just one frontier. Both Alliance and BrotherWorlds found easier expansion elsewhere.

Trade began as hostility waned. Human and KwanDellan discovered that they had a lot in common and that each had things the other wanted. A profitable business relationship ripened into friendship.

And meanwhile, in other sectors, new wars diverted Earth's attention.

The KwanDellans abandoned their own patrol web as soon as it was no longer needed. But human institutions are not so easily dismantled. The Periphery Defense Force remained. But it decayed.

Some ships were transferred away to fight in newer wars. Others were decommissioned and never replaced. Only a trickle of new ships were sent out to the Periphery to aid the aging starspiders.

The Periphery became a backwater. It remained a turbulent border region where a dozen species met and mingled and fleets of merchantmen plied their trade. But no longer was it the front lines. The explorers and the adventurers had moved on to greener planets and blacker skies.

And then one day a light flashed red at Alliance Sector Headquarters on New Victory. Somewhere out between the stars one of the strands in the web had broken.

Or so it seemed.
* * * *

The monitor room was large and circular, and the holomap in its center was a pit of darkness. From the command catwalk built around the room the men on duty could look down into a mock void where the stars of the Periphery glittered in miniature, and smaller green pinpoints of light scuttled endlessly. The monitor panels themselves lined the walls up on the catwalk; banks of gleaming duralloy and steady green lights.

But now one light had gone red, and one of the pinpoints had blinked out down in the holomap.

Fleet Admiral Jefferson Mandel, the sector commandant, was notified at once, and he strode onto the catwalk almost eagerly. He was a short, bull-like man, with narrow dark eyes and a shining bald head. A row of multicolored ribbons danced on the chest of his dull black uniform while the silver galaxies of his rank spiraled on his shoulders.