"Kerrion Empire - 03 - Earth Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

seen enough. Somewhere in Pegasus, among the colo-
nies, KXV 133 lay at spaceanchor, with an injunction to
silence hid upon it by its pilot. The Marada knew pilots;

cruisers keep no secrets from other cruisersЧunless a
masterful pilot suborns a cruiser's mind. Only one pilot
in the whole of the Marada's experience could have en-
joined a cruiser from the host of cruisers. And that man,
mourned in his passing by all cruisers as the outboard's
outboard, was Softa David Spry, his death proclaimed
and attested by the very cruiser who was sitting at space-
anchor in Pegasus under a ban of silence. Since KXV 133

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JANET MORRIS

was where it had no right to be, and doing things no raw
young cruiser should have been able to do, it seemed
clear to the Marada that only two solutions fit the prob-
lem: the pilot aboard the precocious Erinys was, must be,
Spry's equalЧwhich Eriny's rostered pilot indubitably
was notЧor be Spry himself.

The Marada retreated into the sanctity of his private
cogitation to consider. He was glad that he had a valid
reason to lure Shebat up from groundside. He had not
wanted to lie- Even while he had been searching for the
missing cruiser, he had been gathering data on the ques-
tions most prevalent in his outboard's mind.

He could tell her how Chaeron had come to spend so
freely and to borrow so extensively against their hold-
ings. Acheron would be the finest platform ever set into
stable orbit around a planet; state-of-the-art was ex-
tended by it; every detail, every advance and advantage
that the interlock of the finest data pool, data base, and
knowledge base available could schematize, was being
undertaken there. Chaeron Kerrion, demoted to procon-
sul and cast out into an irremediable situation meant to
be his exile, was bent on making exile into empire. From
Acheron, the two hundred and one additional platforms
and planets under his administration would be welded
into dynasty. From Acheron's shipwrights would come
cruiser technologies undreamed of by any but a few pi-
lots, and a certain KXV.

As the Marada reached out and down into the mind of
his outboard Shebat, he noted that Chaeron's cruiser,
Danae, had taken her owner aboard, set off for the