"Daniel Keys Moran - The Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

He flew south and east, still in atmosphere. The Rulers of Earth, as they styled
themselves even now, had ships in geosynchronous orbit. If fortune smiled upon
Cain, the Rulers would have missed the brief moment when the Shield over the
Caverns went down; and if they missed that, they would miss everything.
South he went, across the Glowing Desert, hugging the ground. Near the equator
he began to climb at last on a slow arc. He was over the Antarctic when he finally
reached low Earth orbit. He took a brief moment to adjust his inclination and then,
for the first time, ignited the fusion engines.
Three gravities of acceleration slammed him back into the cocoon of his seat. The
starship dropped below the ecliptic plane of the solar system, accelerating away
from the sun and its gravity well. Cain bore the acceleration stoically, almost without
thought. His attention was far away from the mechanics of the journey.
Calm, the words whispered deep within him, in the voice of a man who had been
dead since before Cain's twenty-first birthday. Center yourself; the enemy lies only
in the lack of balance.
 He submerged his identity in the depths of control, and the world grew very
distant, a series of events happening to someone else entirely.
On the monitor on the instrument panel, the number representing the gravity well
of the solar system dropped beneath a glowing horizontal line. The fusion engines
cut off quite suddenly, and Cain's weight vanished; he hung loosely in the restraints
of his cocoon. In the engines behind Cain power flowed through the subwavicle
engines for the first time in at least a thousand years.
Cain moved one finger, and touched a stud set in the armrest of his cocoon.
The ship hung motionless for an unmeasurable instant.
Dropspace yawned before Cain. The ship submerged itself beneath reality.


An infinite time passed in the blink of an eye.
He hung above the plane of Cassandra's planetary system. The ship was tumbling
slightly on its axis. Cain had no idea where the momentum had come from and did
not care. He touched the attitude jets lightly until the tumble ceased, brought the ship
around to face Cassandra, and punched for the fusion engines.
There was no triumph, anywhere within him.


From space, Earth was the blue of the One Ocean, the white of clouds, and the
brown of baked desert.
The world beneath Cain was green, with less white cloud cover than was normal
for Earth. There were no oceans, no mountains to speak of, no deserts. Cain hung in
high orbit over Cassandra for nearly an hour, examining the information that his
passive instruments brought him. The reports were curious, conflicting.
Spectroscopic examination of the atmosphere showed a percentage of light gases far
higher than Cain had expected: seventy-three percent nitrogen, twenty-two percent
oxygen, and nearly a full four percent split evenly between the noble gases argon and
helium. Possibly, he thought, that was the result of the gas giant primary's nearness.
Presumably the air was breathable; the Sisterhood had not left Earth for an
unlivable world.
The planet's magnetic field was incredibly powerful.
тАж the dim radiance built, and built, a flickering curtain of white fire at the