"Robertson, R Garcia - Gone To Glory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robertson R Garcia Y)

She gave him a defiant glare, daring him to say that AID's multithousand-year
program was a disaster. "The first colonists are on their way -- 10,000
settlers, headed straight from Epsilon Eridani at near light speed. And a
hundred thousand more are set to follow. And a million after that."

Epsilon E was less than twenty light years away.

"Excellent." Hello emptied his champagne glass with an evil chuckle. "Willungha
will have them for breakfast."

The rancher was right. Even a Navy cruiser with antimatter warheads could hardly
cope with ten million Thals spread over an entire planet, (Currently the Navy
had not so much as a captain's gig insystem.) The colonists could be armed of
course -- but the Tuch-Dahs knew all about modern weapons. Dumping an armed mob
of city-bred humans on a strange world, outnumbered 10,000 to 1, with no way of
telling the "good" Thals from the "bad" ones would be a first-magnitude
disaster. They might as well ship the weapons straight to Willungha, compliments
of AID.

Ellenor Battle looked angrily out the lounge window, staring stiff-necked and
imperious at the endless veldt. "There is room enough for humans and
Neanderthals." As she saw it, AID was doing everyone a favor, bringing life to a
dead world, making space for settlement, resurrecting a lost race, perhaps
partly atoning for some ancient Cro-Magnon genocide.

Hello laughed heartily. "Tell that to Willungha. Maybe there is room. If the
wild ones can be tamed, or pushed back. And the colonists kept near the strips.
But no one is planning for that, eh?" He clearly thought someone should be.

"We have plans," Ellenor retorted.

Defoe thought of the lone AID woman in the recording, backed against the
burnt-out wreck, coolly firing at the oncoming Thals. Whatever plans AID was
hoarding had to beat that -- in fact they had better be damned slick.

The great blue-green ink blot of the Azur hove into sight. Azur Station stood at
the near end, a small circle of dugouts and stock pens between the Blue Water
Canal and an east-west fence line. All along the canal the Sleeping Steppe had
been made to bloom, growing rice, melons, and sugar cane.

Azur's station chief met the airship. She was a big weather-beaten woman named
Cleo with flaming red hair, and scoped Centauri Special tucked under her arm --
a sign of the times. A caravan was leaving her station, headed west along the
fence line. The beasts of burden were low-humped retrobred camels, Camelops
hesternus, as strong as bactrians but more docile, with liner wool, also better
eating.

Cleo had the recorder, and the Thal who had brought it, guarded by armed
SuperChimps. The Thai did not understand Universal, or at least pretended not to