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

common along NovemberТs Dragonback mountains; Tyrel had stuck with a weapon he
understood. He had been raised among the poorest of NovemberТs people, the
Dragonback Castille, and had been taught to hunt, with a rifle not much
different from the one he held now, before he had been taught to read.
Now, two decades after he had first been shown how to hold a rifle without
getting smacked in the face by it, the skill might well save his life.
The morning wore along slowly. The mist hung heavy in the air for the first
brief while after sunrise. Sol was cooler than Lucifer, NovemberТs star, even at
the equator, and this far north was cooler still; but it was warm enough to burn
off the mist. Through the course of the long morning Tyrel waited patiently,
SolТs gentle light falling down upon him, warming the air he breathed.
Tyrel wished briefly that heТd thought to bring along imaging binoculars, but
pushed the thought away quickly. He had come to hike, to travel and learn the
country; there had been no reason to expect combat, or any sort of trouble. And
there was no use wishing for things to be other than they were.
Toward mid-day he saw the first flicker of movement. Just a flicker, and then
gone, something brown and gray-green moving through the treeline, perhaps a
kilometer downriver. It might have a bear or a wolf or a deer, wild animals
Tyrel had been told were common to these partsЧbut wild mammals, at least,
rarely use optical camouflage, and Tyrel, in the brief moment he had been able
to see anything, had seen the patch of brown and gray-green slide, like oil on
the water.
Assume the person following him was a night face. Tyrel had enough to go on for
that assumption. If those who had hired his follower knew who he was, then they
knew he had spent the last six years at the College of United Earth
Intelligence, studying nightways; and they would hardly send someone less
skilled than himself to kill him.
And if they did not know who he was, it was not likely they they would be
following him in the first place.
So a night face was probable. It would be in contact with the ship in orbit;
which meant that it knew by now that the ship had lost track of Tyrel.
It would be cautious. Moving slowly. They had time, and the night face might
know it; Tyrel would not be missed for several days, when he did not arrive at
the first checkpoint on his itinerary.
Toward mid-afternoon Tyrel saw it again, the sliding patch of color moving
through the trees toward him. Closer this timeЧfour hundred and fifty or sixty
meters distant, Tyrel judged. Close enough to take a shot if he got a good
sighting.
The afternoon wore on and became evening, and night fell without Tyrel seeing
anything further. He dozed briefly, came awake to the sounds of distant birds in
the night. Around midnight a wind came up, and Tyrel had occasion to regret the
spot he had chosen; the wind swept across the open face of the bluff, and even
at the height of summer it was chill enough it left Tyrel cold and stiff.
Morning again.
The second day passed without any suspicious movement that Tyrel saw.

On TyrelТs third day on the bluff, his sixth day since leaving Seattle, an
aircraft passed overhead, tracked across the high blue bowl of the sky for most
of five minutes while Tyrel watched it. Too high up, and moving too fast; Tyrel
could have unloaded the entire magazine of his rifle in its direction without