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

He was the slip.
The ship cameras were his eyes, fed video to his inskin, and he drifted alone
inside a glowing cathedral of stars. For all he had learned to hate Jupiter, it
had the loveliest sky in the System; Amalthea and Ganymede and Europa hung
behind him in the view from his rear holocams, gray and white and reddish; in
his fore holocams Jupiter covered most of the sky with swirling bands of scarlet
orange. The rockets lay silent now, but soon they would come alive, pressing
Janssen back into his webbing with a savagery a street racer a hundred years
past would have appreciated.
For a brief while, submerged in the identity of his ship, Peter Janssen, one of
only a dozen or so people of his time who had managed to get himself exiled from
the SpaceFarerТs Collective, was as content as he would ever be in his life.
Something beeped on his radar, almost exactly a hundred and eighty degrees away
from the buoy that should have been the only large object in close. A frown
passed like a ghost across JanssenТs features. He danced commands into the
inskin socketed at his temple, and the slipТs rear holocams selected and
telescoped in on the item causing the commotion.
Shining and black and silver came out of nowhere. Janssen had a brief fragmented
impression of a spider web dropping on him from a great heightЧ
Every instrument in the slipship, every powered system, died.
Terror clawed at Janssen, vast and mortal. The muscles in his stomach clenched
painfully and he thought he would be sick inside his ship. A Presence touched
his awareness, shuffled through his memories. The Presence withdrew, and for the
merest instant Janssen was empty.
A wordless concept imprinted itself upon Peter JanssenТs mind. He was caught
instantly in a vast joy, in a certainty of rightness that he had never known
before.
Then the aliens destroyed his ship.

УЕJanssen? Damn it, Peter, are you there? Peter Е Peter?Ф After a long moment,
Peaceforcer Evans leaned back in the chair, gazing blankly at the control panel,
at the telemetry that still glowed on the screens before him.
A spacecraft had approached JanssenТs slip at five percent of the speed of
lightЧand had come to rest relative to the slip in less than a minuteЕ
Еand had destroyed JanssenТs slip thirty seconds later.
Adrienne Gordeau, one of the Ganymean colonyТs two administrators, was a tall,
almost cadaverously thin Frenchwoman; she could have passed for loonie. She
looked at Evans with troubled eyes. УThatТs not a human ship, is it?Ф
Peaceforcer Evans shook his head once, and said quietly, УNo, itТs not.Ф

From the diary of Father Michael Wellsmith, Friday October 8, 2049. The
inscription on the inside cover is in his sister JamieТs handwriting: УIn nomen
Patris, et Filius, et spiritus Sancti. For Michael on his birthday, July 10,
2038.Ф
The entry is:
УTomorrow the aliens will receive us aboard their ship. My Lord, if You do
indeed exist, then hear me now. There is pain within me.
УI hurt.
УThis knowledge of pain is not a new thing, but it is no less easy to bear for
its familiarity.