"Dan Simmons - The rise of Endymion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

Morphing wings and smoothing all surfaces into an aerodynamic shell, the dropship crossed the
terminator into daylight at Mach 3. Beneath it turned the former Templar world of God's Grove -- a
mass of burn scars, ash fields, mudflows, retreating glaciers, and green sequoias struggling to
reseed themselves in the shattered landscape. Slowing now to subsonic speeds, the dropship flew
above the narrow band of temperate climate and viable vegetation near the planet's equator and
followed a river to the stump of the former Worldtree. Eighty-three kilometers across, still a
kilometer high even in its devastated form, the stump rose above the southern horizon like a black
mesa. The dropship avoided the Worldstump and continued to follow the river west, continuing to
descend until it landed on a boulder near the point where the river entered a narrow gorge. The
two men and the woman came down the extruded stairs and reviewed the scene. It was midmorning on
this part of God's Grove, the river made a rushing noise as it entered the rapids, birds and
unseen arboreals chittered in the thick trees farther downriver. The air smelled of pine needles,
unclassifiable alien scents, wet soil, and ash. More than two and a half centuries earlier, this
world had been smashed and slashed from orbit. Those two-hundred-meter-high Templar trees that did
not flee to space had burned in a conflagration that continued to rage for the better part of a
century, extinguished at last only by a nuclear winter.
"Careful," said one of the men as the three walked downhill to the river. "The monofilaments
she webbed here should still be in place."
The thin woman nodded and removed a weapon laser from the flowfoam pak she carried. Setting the
beam to widest dispersal, she fanned it over the river. Invisible filaments glowed like a spider's
web in morning dew, crisscrossing the river and wrapping around boulders, submerging and
reemerging from the white-frothed river.
"None where we have to work," said the woman as she shut off the laser. The three crossed a low
area by the river and climbed a rocky slope. Here the granite had been melted and flowed downhill
like lava during the slagging of God's Grove, but on one of the terraced rockfaces there were even
more recent signs of catastrophe. Near the top of a boulder ten meters above the river, a crater
had been burned into solid rock. Perfectly circular, indented half a meter below the level of the
boulder, the crater was five meters across.
On the southeast side, where a waterfall of molten rock had run and splattered and fountained
to the river below, a natural staircase of black stone had formed. The rock filling the circular
cavity on top of the boulder was darker and smoother than the rest of the stone, looking like
polished onyx set in a granite crucible.
One of the men stepped into the concavity, lay full length on the smooth stone, and set his ear
to the rock. A second later he rose and nodded to the other two.
"Stand back," said the woman. She touched her wristband comlog.
The three had taken five steps back when the lance of pure energy burned from space. Birds and
arboreals fled in loud panic through the screening trees. The air ionized and became superheated
in seconds, rolling a shock wave in all directions. Branches and leaves burst into flame fifty
meters from the beam's point of contact. The cone of pure brilliance exactly matched the diameter
of the circular depression in the boulder, turning the smooth stone to a lake of molten fire.
The two men and the woman did not flinch. Their shipsuits smoldered in the open hearth-furnace
heat, but the special fabric did not burn. Neither did their flesh.
"Time," said the woman over the roar of the energy beam and widening firestorm. The golden beam
ceased to exist. Hot air rushed in at gale-force winds to fill the vacuum. The depression in the
rock was a circle of bubbling lava.


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