"Christopher Rowley - The Military Form" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowley Christopher)

This brought on feelings close to despair when the Military Form contemplated certain cosmological
possibilities. If the universe consisted solely of "remnant mass," left over from all-consuming gravitational
contractions shortly after the big bang, then it was an "open" universe, and thus endless. The stars would
eventually go out, the galaxies darken, and in the barren void it would float on, too far from anything else
to effect a micron's worth of difference to the flow.

Twice, during the half-billion years that the pod had orbited there, it had passed within five million
kilometers of another small body. With no motive power except muscles, and no spacesuit, the Military
Form had not dared to strike out for either. It could survive in vacuum for a considerable time, but not if
it had to adopt a form capable of work.

What made the situation irretrievably bitter was that the system boasted a life world, a bright fat disk
that showed blue oceans in the telescope. A world that undoubtedly had host!

Host! it was enough to make even the Military Form quake with the wanting. But the water world was
safe, and the Military Form could do no more than watch its bright disk and hunger for it.

Naturally, the Higher Form that the Military Form guarded within the pod, had gone into life suspension
a long, long time ago, even before the pod had fallen into this solar system.

For this the Military Form was extremely thankful. Having the Higher Form awake with it, cooped up
in the tiny pod, would have been miserable. Through many campaigns and innumerable victories, the
Military Form had developed a powerful aversion to the complaining of higher forms.

In solitude therefore, the Military Form continued to obey its genetic compulsions, searching the
surrounding space for close passing asteroids. Every so often it regenerated the optical surfaces of its
telescopic limb to refresh the input. Other than that, it did little but breathe once a minute or so.

Its duty was to cling to life, no matter how bitter that might be. For all it knew, it was the very last of its
race, the only survivor of the Gods of Axone-Neurone.

In the Saskatch colony district, located in the temperate sector of the northern hemisphere, it was late
spring. Fine weather had brought a break in the clouds; the sun shone over the Elizabeth River Valley.
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Way out in the backwoods of the Black Ruk Planetary Park the sound of a heavy motor cut the cool,
humid air. In a ravine a little south of Mount Servus, a walker was groaning and shaking atop its long
legs, stuck halfway up a sixty-degree slope.

In the cab, a forty-year-old drug smuggler named Carney Waxx cursed and screamed, banged his
palms on the driving wheel and begged the walker to climb, at least to the safety of the thick stands of
kinkpine that cloaked the ridge top.

On the computer's main screen the "predicted" radar trace continued to grow.

"C'mon baby, do it for Carney now. C'mon baby, do it or the law is gonna be on top of us and we are