"H. Beam Piper - First Cycle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

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Chapter One

For endless millenia the red dwarf, pulled from its home orbit by some random stellar happenstance,
crossed the lonely void between the two galaxies of the near universe. Curving and twisting through the
competing attractionтАФweak but inevitableтАФof the gravity wells of distant nebulae, it gradually swung
around to head toward a particular medium-sized star cluster. Penetrating the cluster, it bore straight
toward the eight-planet system of a yellow-white star thirty-eight light years from the cluster's gravitic
center.

The eighth planet, and the seventh, and the sixth, were on the far sides of their orbits as the red dwarf
approached; but the fifth, a methane giant with three major satellites, was in harm's way. As they closed
together, the planet heated; its coating of frigid gasses flowed, and then vaporized. Great tidal forces tore
at the planet's dense, solid core. Quakes and explosions shook the surface; the atmosphere burned.

For an instant, during which the great planet seemed to hesitate in its orbit, the seismic insult increased
past endurance. Two of the three major moons were ripped away; they spiraled inward to the yellow star
and disappeared as though they had never been. The third satellite, torn almost equally between its
mother planet and the passing dwarf, slowed in its orbit, and then, as the red star passed, came crashing
down on its primary. This final shock broke the giant planet into two almost equal halves, and a minor
planet's worth of solar debris.

The red dwarf, dragging the broken halves after it, dived toward the yellow star. The fourth planet
escaped with no more than superficial damage, the third passed unscathed. But the second was directly
in the path of the destroyer. It swung from its orbit, spun madly for an instant, and then hurtled into the
red star like a racing scull ramming a battleship.

Relatively, the planet's mass and impact were trivial; the sacrificial collision, however, prevented a greater
catastrophe at the center of the system. The invader caromed slightly off course, lost momentum, and
was trapped. The attraction of the yellow sun, the lesser attractions of the planet family, and the red
dwarfs own new velocity combined to pin it to an orbit slightly greater than that of the planet it had just
annihilated. Spinning around one another like a pair of bar-shot on an ever-shortening bar, the two
fragments of the fifth planet followed it.

In time, as time is measured in the cosmos, the system stabilized. The frozen outer planets wheeled
around their ancient orbits. The shattered fifth had left a wide gap. There was a thin belt of meteoric
debris inside the orbit of the third. And, just beyond the orbit of the vanished second, the new comer and
her own new satellite chain traced and re-traced the orbits imposed on them; yellow star, red dwarf, and
attendant fragments forming a three-body system at the apexes of a one-hundred and fifty million
kilometer equilateral triangle.

The two planet fragments slowly accommodated themselves to one another and to the rest of their
violently re-formed solar system. They crumbled, pulled together, compressed into spheres. Stripped of
all atmosphere in the cataclysm which had sundered them, they formed now gaseous envelopes, lost them
as the heated gas molecules escaped, formed other atmospheres, and held them as their surfaces cooled.
At first they rotated on their own axes as they revolved around a common center of gravity. As they
drew closer together, this axial rotation slowed until, at a quarter-million kilometers, they faced each