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

stepped from the bronze gates of the Soulhouse, down the marble staircase into the
thronged Maidan of All Luminous Passion. Irony was still a tradable commodity on
this innermost tier of the hundred concentric spheres of the Heart-world, even if not
one woman or man or machine or beastli turned its head. Battleship crews knew
better than to expect laurels and accolades when they resouled after a hundred or a
thousand or ten thousand years on the frontline. Word of Ever-Fragrant PerfumeтАЩs
victory had arrived almost three centuries before. A signal victory; a triumph that
would be studied and taught across the Military Colleges and Academies of the Art
of Defense for millennia to come. A classic Rose of Jericho strategy.

Early warning seeds sown like thistledown across half a light-millennium had
felt the stroke of the Enemy across their attenuated slow senses and woke.
Communication masers hastily assembled from the regoliths of cold moons beamed
analyses back to the Heart-world, deep in its centuries-long task of biosphere
salvation: eighty thousand habitats on the move. The Clade battle fleet launched
instantly. After two hundred and twenty years, there was not a nanosecond to lose.
Thirty-five ships were lost: systems mal-functions, breakdowns in the drives that
kept them accelerating eternally, decades-long subtle errors of navigation that left
them veering light-years wide of the target gravity well, loss of deceleration mass.
Sudden total cata-strophic failure. Five hundred years later, Ever-Fragrant Perfume
of Divinity alone arrived behind the third moon of the vagrant gas giant, which
wan-dered between stars, a gravitational exile, and began to construct the rain of
antimatter warheads and set them into orbit around the wanderer. A quick plan, but a
brilliant one. A Rose of Jericho plan. As Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity
accelerated away from the bright new nebula, its hindward sen-sors observed eighty
thousand Enemy worlds plow into the bow wave of accelerated gas at forty percent
light-speed and evaporate. Twenty trillion sentients died. War in space-time is slow
and vast and bloody. When the spe-cies fight, there is no mercy.

In the dying echoes of the culture fleet, the three assassins of Ever-Fragrant
Perfume of Divinity caught a vector. The fleet had not been aimed on a genocidal
assault on the Clade Heart-worlds clustered around the worlds of Seydatryah, slowly
becoming postbiological as the sun choked and bloated on its own gas. A vector,
and a whisper: VerthandiтАЩs Ring.

But now they were back, huzzah! Harvest Moon and Scented Coolabar and
Rose of Jericho, greatest tactician of her flesh generation. Except that when they
turned around on the steps of the Soulhouse to bicker among themselves (as they
had bickered the entire time-slowed twenty-six minutes of the transtellar flight, and
the time-accelerated two hundred years of the mission at the black wanderer) about
where to go and do and be and funk first:

тАЬWhereтАЩs Rose? WhereтАЩs the Rose?тАЭ said Harvest Moon, whose rank
approximated most closely to the historical role of Captain.

Only two resouls stood on the marble steps overlooking the Maidan of All
Luminous Pleasure.

тАЬShit,тАЭ said Scented Coolabar, whose station corresponded to that of
engineer. A soul-search returned no trace of their crewmate on this level. In this