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

plish, Rafe Penrose yet recalled his amazing approach
vector into Acheron: all the toroids and shield sleeves
spinning lazily, mass-driver components and solar collec-
tors glittering, agrospheres gleaming like a broken strand
of pearls, made it seem that a gargantuan child's toybox
had been upended amid ancestral stars.

Searching for Chaeron Ptolemy Kerrion through the
data net, RP had not been able to shake off the image,
with its pejorative tinge: Chaeron was a child sent to his
room by his betters, and all the lives now in his hands
merely playthings.

By the time a gleaming, snub-snouted consular lorry
had deposited him on the fresh-laid sod of one of
Acheron's sharp little hills, RP felt like weeping. He was
overtired, he told himself, from his journey fraught with
stress, and the trauma of being uprooted twice: first from
Draconis to the Stump; then from the Stump to here,
although "here" was the exact same set of coordinates
which had held the Stump in stable orbit above the Earth
for more than two centuries.

But then he spied Chaeron, just ducking out of a con-
sular command transport, still in expedition gear from
Earthly sojourn. A tightness tickled his throat, rode

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down to his chest as he cut across the sod, his steps too
springy in this as-yet-only-approximate gravity, the not-
quite-regulation pressure of the "almost" operational
habitational sphere making his pulse trip and gallop.

Anticipation chased his malaise away: to be able to say
"I have done it" to Chaeron, to stand in receipt of the
ex-Draconis consul's most intimate smile, was a privilege
hard won and still coveted by Raphael Penrose, "first
bitch," or top-rated, pilot of Kerrion space.

To the newly-Kemon minions looking on from the
cockpit of the black command transport, and to the
driver of the sleek eagle-blazoned lorry, there was no
question about the degree of relationship between this
pilot and their proconsul. Through a sextet of
plainclothed intelligencers, Penrose's chestnut-curled