"George R. R. Martin - 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 foughtтАФto 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.