"Antares - 02 - Antares Passage" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

animals and did not leave the water for the land until quite recently in their
past. Experts tell us that they were forced from the water by another sentient
race on their home world, a race the Ryall call the swift eaters. It is this
incident in their history that we believe makes them so territorial that they
have attacked us without provocation. That being the case, the only thing left
for us to do is..."
Drake did not wait to find out what the narrator had in mind. He nudged Bethany
and said, "Come on, we've better things to do than listen to this."
She glanced at him and smiled slyly. "Maybe we can ask the taxi driver to take a
shortcut into town."
#
The return of their star's foldpoint should have been front-page news throughout
the Valeria system. In fact, no one noticed. For a foldpoint is a difficult
object to find under the best of circumstances, and after 125 years of
isolation, the Altans had stopped looking. Therefore, it came as something of a
shock when an unidentified starship materialized high above Val's ecliptic and
immediately began thrusting for deep space.
Despite their surprise, the Altans lost no time in dispatching a ship to
investigate. What it discovered was a battered warship bearing the markings of
the Grand Fleet of Earth, and a crew of corpses. Somewhere in its travels, the
Earth fleet blastship had been badly mauled in battle and abandoned by its
surviving crewmembers. After that, it had jumped blindly from foldpoint to
foldpoint under the control of a radiation-damaged autopilot, eventually ending
up in the Val system.
With evidence of fighting beyond the foldpoint, the Altans had hurriedly
organized an expedition to scout the situation. The expedition's first
destination had been the Napier system and the colony world of New Providence.
It had been from New Providence that Alta had originally been colonized. What
the Altan expedition found was an ancestral home abandoned by its inhabitants.
It had not been difficult to discover the reason. All the while the Altan ships
were in the system, their outside radiation monitors had chattered wildly. New
Providence and the whole Napier system had been made uninhabitable by the
radiation from the nearby Antares Supernova.
The discovery that New Providence was a dead world had saddened, but not
surprised, the Altans. A number of astronomers had warned them that the fifteen
light-years that separated Napier from Antares was insufficient to protect the
system from the full fury of the supernova. What had surprised the Altans was
the condition in which they found most of New Providence's cities. The steady
rain of high-energy photons and charged particles was deadly to all forms of
life, but should not have materially affected the concrete, stone, and steel
that comprises a city. The Altans had expected to find a world of abandoned, but
pristine, municipalities.
What they found instead were horizon-to-horizon ruins bearing the unmistakable
signs of nuclear bombardment. Shocked at the sight of widespread destruction,
the Altans had dug through the ruins, searching for clues to what had
precipitated the fighting. What they found had been the biggest surprise of all.
For, contrary to the explorers' expectations, the New Providentials had not
fallen to fighting among themselves. They had been attacked by a race of
centauroid aliens, the Ryall.
Shortly after learning of the aliens' existence, the Altan expedition had