Читать онлайн «Ancients»
Автор Дэвид Линн Гоулмон
Ancients
by
David Golemon
DEDICATIONS
For my father--who I lost this past year, I wish I had been as good to you as you were to me. Twenty-twenty hindsight can be a horrible and haunting thing. I can only hope and pray that you could see beyond my youth, see the man, and know in your heart I tried to be the best I could be.
For Roxie--a cousin, now a sister, for enduring the unendurable, the loss of a child, it should happen to no one in the entire world. My heart is broken for you.
For Maribeth--to the ghosts of youth, may we forever be haunted and happier for it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the United States Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Army; for the assistance in the writing of this novel, you have my deepest thanks.
To the United States Geological Service and the help that was given on theory and science. The assistance rendered was far beyond anything and I am grateful.
For Pete Wolverton, who always reminds me I can be better than the first draft (and sometimes better than even the second).
MAPS
PROLOGUE
The council elder sat alone in the darkened chamber. His mind focused on the empire's dire situation and the harsh judgment that history would render upon his great civilization.
The cruelty they had shown against the lesser peoples of the world was now coming back a thousandfold to haunt the ringed continent. This judgment, this disaster, had begun three years earlier, with the rebellion of the barbarian nations in the outer empire, north and south.When the elder closed his eyes, he thought he could actually hear the far-off cries of citizens and soldiers alike as they prepared for the final defense of what the barbarians thought of as Olympus and the very gods they once worshiped. While he sat secure inside the Empirium Dome, safe behind the eight-foot-thick triangles of crystal that made up the geodesic bubble, the rest of his world stood unprotected against the onslaught of the allied barbarian nations assaulting the empire.
He opened his aged, half-blind eyes and looked at the order that the Empirium Council had written out only an hour before condemning not only the barbarians but
Androlicus reached out and with a shaking and age-spotted hand removed the silk wrap that covered the huge diamond before him. He stared deep into the immense blue gemstone for a moment and then allowed his fingers to touch the deep and swirling tone grooves etched into its surface by their finest scientists. There were two more Keys such as the one before him--precious stones that had taken fifty lifetimes to find and half as much to engineer, and were the secret at the heart of the Great Sound Wave.
One Key was being prepared even now, far below the earth. The second was hidden in the land of the hostile Nubians, many hundreds of kilometers to the south in the farthest reaches of the empire. The third sat before him, identical in shape and design and meant to control the uncontrollable.
