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

his own domain. He was the most feared, and likely the most hated, human then alive
on the face of the Earth.
Cain was, in his own person, quite certainly the deadliest. The Worker or
Workers who made the mistake of an attempt on his life would die, quickly and
surely.
Possibly the Ruler Loden was more dangerous than Cain; it was likely he was
feared by a greater number of sentient beings. But Loden, Cain believed, was not a
human being.
Cain walked down the corridors. Doors opened at his approach, closed again as
he passed. Once he crossed the path of two pair of his barbarian ken Selvren
guards, changing the guard at the East Gate. One was a half-breed, with darker skin
than his fellows, but the same silver eyes. Cain did not speak to them, but merely
continued on his way. The guards, after a brief pause, went about their business. In
the dim lighting that was the norm for the night hours, one might have thought that
the guards had not noticed his passage.
They were ken Selvren. One would have been wrong.


Despite the hour, the shipyard was acrawl with activity, the center of which was a
slim needle of black metal, utterly unlike any of the other fighter craft arrayed across
the yard. The ship bore no visible weapons; no mountings for lasers, no heatseeker
grips. The smooth black hull was one surface, without seam or weld anywhere upon
it. It seemed to absorb light; its surface gave no reflection.
It was the result of over ten years' labor by the finest human engineers in
existence. It was, so far as Cain's engineers could make it, an exact duplicate of a
Falcon-class slipship, the smallest faster-than-light starship ever built. The hull, the
instrumentation, the reaction engines, all were modeled upon the starships that the
Ruler Donner Almandar had built in the third century a.t.f. to serve as scouts for the
great fleet of starships which he had led from Earth in that century. The subwave
motor was more than "modeled" upon one of Donner's ships; it had actually been
taken from the shell of a thousand-year-old Falcon found at the edge of the Glowing
Desert, far to the south. They had reconditioned the subwave motor; repaired the
casing which held it, replaced with new materials all the parts which they were
capable of understanding. But the core of the engine, the blocks of molar probability
circuitry, they could not touch; had they, however accidentally, harmed that circuitry,
decades would have passed while they strove to re-create it.


Half a dozen junior Commanders stood behind them at rigid attention.
Cain and Mersai stood together in the Command Center, before the huge star
chart, with a full sixteenth of the galaxy spread across its surface. A bright blue
dotтАФthe solar system, and Earth, though at that resolution they were the
sameтАФglowed at its far left side, and near its far right side was a single green dot.
The chart was twice the height of a man; a Giant would, just barely, have reached its
top.
The image was ludicrous, of course. Standing there in his grimly efficient combat
fatigues, Commander General Orrin Mersai's age-ruined visage moved in a faint
smile. The Giant who made his way into the Caverns, for whatever reason, was a
dead Giant.
"We don't have decades," Cain was saying without heat. "There's something