"David Weber & Linda Evans - Hell Hath No Fury" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

- Prologue

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 - Prologue




Preface
The vertical cut in the cliff face only looked razor-thin. Even the broadest railway cut looked like a
narrow crack when it was cut into the face of a sheer precipice over three thousand feet tall.
Darcel Kinlafia knew that. He'd already passed through what the guidebooks had taken to calling the
Traisum Cut once before, outbound, but it was the sort of sight not even the most jaded trans-universal
traveler could ever tire of.
That was why he'd climbed out of his seat in the rattling, banging so-called "passenger car" and stepped
out onto the front platform so that he could see it better as the train started up the four-mile approach
ramp to the cut. Now he stood there, hands on the guard rail, staring out and up at one of the most
spectacular pieces of scenery imaginable.
The portal between the universes of Traisum and Karys was one of the smaller ones Sharona had
explored. Or, rather, it was effectively one of the smaller ones. The theorists believed it was actually
much larger, but that most of it was buried underground in both universes. Only the uppermost arc of the
circular portal was exposed, and the terrain in the two universes it connected was . . . dissimilar, to say
the least. The Karys side of the portal was located near what would have been the Arpathian city of
Zaithag in Darcel Kinlafia's birth universe; the Traisum side was located in the Ithal Mountains west of
the city of Narshalla in Shurkhal.
That was what created the spectacular scenery. Zaithag was barely seven hundred feet above sea level;
the mountains west of Narshalla reached heights of over forty-six hundred feet . . . and the portal's
Traisum nexus was located smack in the middle of one of those mountains.
Most people who saw it from the Karys side for the first time felt a peculiar sense of disorientation. It
was something the human eye and the human mind weren't trained to expect: an absolutely vertical,
glassy-smooth cliff over a half-mile high at its shortest point and four and a half miles wide.
The good news was that Karys was outbound from Sharona. That had allowed the Trans-Temporal
Express' construction crews to come at it from the slopes of Mount Karek rather than straight out of the
mountain's heart. The portal was actually located east of the mountain's crest, which made the
impossible cliff several hundred feet shorter from the Karys side and the approach slope perhaps three or
four miles shorter from the Traisum side. TTE's engineers were accustomed to stupendous construction
projects fit to dwarf the Grand Ternathian Canal or New Farnal Canal, but this one had been a stretch
even for them. It had taken them years (and more tons of dynamite than Kinlafia cared to contemplate)
to complete, and all meaningful exploration down-chain from Traisum had been bottlenecked until
they'd finally finished it. The cut was five miles long, eighteen hundred feet deep where its Karys
terminus met the top of the approach ramp, and wide enough for a four-track right-of-way and a double-
wide road for wheeled traffic. The grade, needless to say, was steep.
Now the locomotive chuffed more nosily than ever, laboring as it started into that deep, shadowed gulf
of stone. Its smoke plume fumed up, adding its own fresh coat of grime and soot to the stains already