"Ian McDonald - Verthandi's Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

of a head start had not the Hujjain craft in its final milliseconds squirted off a burst of
communication to its mother array deep in the cometary system on the edge of
interstellar space.
 In the opening centuries of the long, slow war, the CladeтАЩs expansion was
checked and turned back. Trillions died. Planets were cindered; populations
sterilized beneath a burning ultraviolet sky, their ozone layers and protective magnetic
fields stripped away; habitat clusters incinerated by induced solar flares or reduced
to slag by nanoprocessor plagues; Dyson spheres shattered by billions of antimatter
warheads. The Clade was slow to realize what the Enemy understood from the start:
that a war for the resources that intelli-gence requiredтАФenergy, mass, gravityтАФmust
be a war of extermination. In the first two thousand years of the war, the CladeтАЩs
losses equaled the total biomass of its original prestarflight solar system. But its
fecundity, the sheer irrepressibility of life, was the CladeтАЩs strength. It fought back.
Across centu-ries it fought; across distances so vast the light of victory or defeat
would be pale, distant winks in the night sky of far future generations. In the hearts
of globular clusters they fought, and the radiant capes of nebulae; through the
looping fire bridges on the skins of suns and along the event horizons of black holes.
Their weapons were gas giants and the energies of supernovae; they turned asteroid
belts into shotguns and casually flung living planets into the eternal ice of interstellar
space. Fleets ten thousand a side clashed between suns, leaving not a single
survivor. It was war absolute, elemental. Across a million star systems, the Clade
fought the Enemy to a standstill. And, in the last eight hundred years, began to drive
them back.

Now, time dilated to the point where a decade passed in a single heart-beat,
total mass close to that of a thousand stars, the Clade Heart-world Seydatryah and
its attendant culture cluster plunged at a prayer beneath light-speed toward the closed
cosmic string loop of VerthandiтАЩs Ring. She flew blind; no information, no report
could outrun her. Her half trillion sentients would arrive with only six months
forewarning into what might be the final victory, or the EnemyтАЩs final stand.

Through the crystal shell of the Heart-world, they watched the Clade attack
fleet explode like thistledown against the glowing nebula of the Enemy migration.
Months ago those battleships had died, streaking ahead of the decelerating
Seydatryah civilization to engage the Enemy pickets and, by dint of daring and force
of fortune, perhaps break through to attack a habitat cluster. The greater mass of the
Clade, dropping down the blue shift as over the years and decades they fell in
behind Seydatryah, confirmed the astonished reports of those swift, bold fighters.
All the Enemy was here; a caravanserai hundreds of light-years long. Ships, worlds,
had been under way for centuries before Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity located
and destroyed one of the pilgrim fleets. The order must have been given millennia
before; shortly after the Clade turned the tide of battle in its favor. Retreat. Run
away. But the Enemy had lost none of its strength and savagery as wave after wave
of the cheap, fast, sly battle-ships were annihilated.

Scented Coolabar and Harvest Moon and Rose of Jericho huddled to-gether
in the deep dark and crushing pressure of the ocean at the bottom of the world.
They wore the form of squid; many-tentacled and big-eyed, com-municating by
coded ripples of bioluminescent frills along their streamlined flanks. They did not
doubt that they had watched themselves die time after time out there. It was likely