"Continuing Time - 98 - Lord November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

Then It flooded back upon him, smashed him down, and took him as It had taken
the others.
Father Michael stumbled, found himself jerked back to his feet like a puppet,
and he tumbled forward with the rest of them, half-falling, a clown in
GanymedeТs gentle gravity. It did not bother him; nothing bothered him, not the
loss of his dignity or his freedom; not the trembling beneath his feet as the
remnants of a smashed moon came hurtling down to the surface of Ganymede, nor
the darkness in the shipТs hold, nor the brief and improbably gentle
acceleration as the alien ship lifted away from GanymedeТs surface, took him and
Bear and Sheila and Peaceforcer Evans away from everything they had ever known.
He was wholly at peace with himself; after more than forty years as a Catholic,
Father Michael Wellsmith was going home.



Transcription of an Underground background interview with Neil Corona, 2090
Gregorian:
ЕJamie Wellsmith and I had both lost family in the destruction of the Ganymede
colony, back in С49; itТs how we met one another. My younger brother Bear, and
her older brother Michael, were members of the party, sent out from St. PeterТs
CityState, that was charged with establishing a beachhead on Ganymede.
Bear and I hadnТt spoken in better than fifteen years at the time. Bear was
pretty high up in the Johnny Rebs at one point; he kept after me to join through
most of the late С20s and early С30s, in a series of increasingly bitter
arguments. In С33 the Peaceforcers tossed me into a Detention Center for most of
a year. I got the message; in С34 I left America, left Earth.
And went to Halfway. At the time there was no PFK presence to speak of in space;
there were not quite two million people living off Earth at all, and the
Peaceforcers were busy consolidating the Unification on Earth; they had no time
to bother with an ex-U.S. Marine who had very obligingly left the planet.
My last conversation with Bear was so bitter that it took me a couple of years
to forgive him. But Bear held grudges with a vengeance; even after IТd decided
to try and patch things up, he never accepted my calls, and finally I simply
stopped trying. Sometime in the mid-forties he left Earth himselfЧthat or a
firing squad, as I understood itЧended up at St. PeterТs CityState, out in the
Belt. Back in the forties there were still a couple of CityStates that were,
putatively, loyal to the Unification; St. PeterТs was one of them. (As I recall,
it was the next-to-the-last of the CityStates to break away from the
Unification, in С54. Only the White Russians held out longer; and by С56 even
they could see that remaining as part of the Unification made no sense for the
CityStates.)
I donТt know who was responsible for what happened, if anyone. At the time half
the experts swore it was a natural disaster, tidal stress or something equally
unlikely, that destroying Europa was beyond the technical capabilities of even
the Unification; and the other half swore that from the little that remained
afterward, it looked as though Europa had been done in by a monster nuke,
perhaps anti-matter, and that it looked like a shaped charge.
I donТt know. All I know is that on October 9, 2049, Europa blew and Ganymede
caught a chunk of it.
After the colony got smashed, Jamie Wellsmith came looking for me.