"Alexander Kazantsev. The Destruction of Faena (ГИБЕЛЬ ФАЭНЫ, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

get rid of him.
The thing that mattered to him most now was Mada's safety. She was the
only one he would want to save from among the millions of doomed.
But how?
And so, in fulfilment of the complex plan that had occurred to him, he
had appeared unexpectedly during a session of Peaceful Space in the Temple
of Eternity. And now Um Sat was due to arrive.
The officer of the Blood Guard, Yar Alt's brother, handed Um Sat over
to two security robots which led the sage of learning through low-ceilinged,
sumptuously furnished halls.
Urn Sat glanced out of the corner of his eye at his unwieldy bodyguards
or escorts with their cubic heads and hooked, scaly manipulators.
In one of the rooms, a box with glittering slits in it, just like the
one that the Dictator used, said with programmed floweriness in the
impeccable ancient manner:
"Urn Sat, honorary longface, may pass through the door in front of him,
on the other side of which there awaits him the most blissful meeting with
the greatest of the great, the most brilliant of the brilliant, Yar Jupi,
Dictator of the continent of the Superiors."
The door opened of its own accord, the robot security guards fell
behind and Urn Sat went into the grim, empty dungeon with the grey walls.
Yar Jupi, bearded, hook-nosed, with a shaven skull and upslanting
eyebrows, rushed to meet the visitor, riveting him with a piercing, half-mad
stare.
"Does Urn Sat realise what honour and trust has been afforded him?" he
shouted.
"Yes, so be it," sighed the Elder. "Though I be unworthy of such
honour, I may be trusted."
"I am going to talk as Superior to Superior, the more so since you are
famous for your mind," said the Dictator more calmly this time.
According to the ritual, the guest was supposed to reply that his
brains were below comparison with the divine and enlightened intellect of
Yar Jupi, but Um Sat calmly said:
"I shall converse with the Dictator Yar Jupi as an Elder of learning
with a politician, striving to understand and be understood."
Yar Jupi started, his nose twitched and his face was distorted by a
nervous grimace. He looked sideways at a niche under the window. There were
wonderful flowers standing in it. Their tender, dark-blue corollas with the
golden sprinkling of the finest stars, each with up to six petals, looked
down, dangling on bowed stems.
This was a miracle, bred by the nurserymen on the orders of Yar Jupi, a
passionate lover of flowers. But it was not their evening beauty that
attracted him. The submissive horticulturalists had managed to breed a
vegetable miracle, or rather monster, which exuded an aroma that was
poisonous, however gentle it might seem. Any Faetian who inhaled it was
stricken down with a fatal disease. More than once, rare visitors to this
study, excessively independent-minded comrades-in-arms, received by the
Dictator with unexpected warmth, sometimes even a few of his
over-discontented masters, the big proprietors, had been privileged to sniff
the greatest of all treasures. On returning home, they had died in agony