"Michael McCollum - Man of Renaissance" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

toward the rear of the hacienda. His demeanor showed no sign of the adrenaline storm that raged in his
bloodstream. For if his probing had stirred the General to suspect that he was more than the traveling
medic/storyteller/troubadour he pretended to be, this was the moment of greatest danger.

No lurking guards stepped out to bar his way, no shots rang out of the darkness, not even the hacienda
dogs bothered him as he crunched along the graveled pathway at the rear of the house. He quickly
finished taking care of necessities in the hacienda outhouse, and stepped back into the cold night air of
the desert.

He paused to light his pipe. The lighter was a flare of blue against the yellow lights emanating from the
hacienda windows. He puffed quickly, and was rewarded with the bitter taste of tobacco smoke on his
tongue. He drew in a lung full of the smoke, and then exhaled slowly. As he did so, a bright light just
above the northern horizon caught his attention. He stepped out of the shade of the trees to get a clear
view as the familiar star began to climb the sky.

#

Beckwith's internal alarm clock woke him two hours before dawn to a pitch-black world lit only by star
shine. In spite of the heat of the previous day, the night air was brisk against his bare skin, causing him to
shiver at the thought of throwing back the covers and leaving the warmth of his soft bed. He stalled the
inevitable for a few moments by remembering the bright star he had watched cross the heavens the
previous evening.

By rights, the Catastrophe should have ended all life on Earth. That it had not was a tribute to the
overlapping layers of orbital fortresses and satellites the two pre-Catastrophe superpowers had built with
such laborious care over a thirty-year period. When finally the world had gone insane and the missiles
began to fly, fewer than one in fifty warheads survived to explode against their intended targets. The
other forty-nine had either been destroyed with their carrier missiles, in transit through the vacuum of
space, or in the final seconds of their terminal maneuvers.

Coordinating the defenses had been the great manned battle stations. The greatest of these was High
Citadel , the prime command-and-control facility for the western alliance. First constructed in the early
years of the twenty-first century, High Citadel had been constantly enlarged, strengthened, and
improved. In addition to being the nerve center for all western orbital defenses, High Citadel 's
computers had been used to archive all manner of scientific and technological data.

During the six weeks the war lasted, High Citadel had defeated everything the eastern bloc could throw
against it. It had destroyed the east's own system of orbital fortresses in a duel that had turned night into
day across the entire face of the planet. Finally, it had directed the strikes that destroyed the eastern
bloc's surviving missile fields, and thereby brought about a cessation of hostilities.

The end came too late to save technological civilization. For, although the orbiting satellites and defense
stations had saved the human race from extinction, sufficient megatonnage had gotten through to smash
the industrial base on which civilization was built. In less than a year, Earth was swept by successive
waves of famine and plague. Those men and women still in orbit watched as their world disintegrated
into ever-smaller warring groups. These orbiting warriors were finally forced to abandon their posts as
food, water, and air ran low. One by one, their emergency craft departed High Citadel to slip below
the roiling clouds of Earth, never to return. For eighty years, the deserted battle station's anti-laser armor
had reflected the rays of the sun with mirror brightness, making High Citadel one of the brightest stars in
the terrestrial sky.