Chapter 19 Chapter Eighteen
Chief executive Meina Gladstone was tossing and turning.She got up from the dark apartment deep in the government building, dressed quickly, and then started to do what she often did when she was insomnia—walking around the planets.
Her private transom portal flashed.Yueshi's human bodyguards were sitting in the front hall. She ignored them and walked in with only a tiny remote control.If it weren't for the laws of the overlord and the technical core regulations, she wouldn't bring anything.But that doesn't meet the rules.
Whaleheart's midnight is long past, but she knows there are many planets where it should still be daylight, so she wears a long shawl with a ripping neckline sewn from Revival.Pants and boots were neither gender nor class, although the quality of that cape itself might have made her stand out in some places.
Executor Pleasant stepped across the one-way entrance, and though she neither saw nor heard it, she felt the tiny remote buzzing right behind her as she walked into St. Peter's Square in Payson's New Vatican. Screaming through, climbing to unseen heights.At the beginning, she didn't know why she entered the code of this region in the implant port - was it because the old and fat monk was also present at the Shenlin banquet? —but then she realized that as she lay tossing and turning she had been thinking about the Pilgrims, the seven who had set off for Hyperion three years earlier to meet their fate.Payson had once been the home of Father Rainer Hoyt... and his predecessor, another priest, Duré.
Pleasure Stone shrugged and walked across the square.Visiting the Pilgrim's Old Planet was as good an arrangement as any of her previous walks; most sleepless nights she would walk twenty planets and be home by dawn for the pilgrimage at the Whale Center.At least today, she will only go to seven planets.
It's still early here.Payson's sky is a hot yellow, dotted with pale green clouds, filled with the smell of ammonia, and her eyes are streaming with tears.There is a faint smell of disgusting chemicals in the air. I don't know if it's because the planet has not yet completed terraforming, or it is hostile to humans.Yue Shi stopped and looked around.
St. Peter's Basilica is built on the top of the hill, the square is surrounded by semi-circular ring columns, and there is a magnificent basilica at the top of the curve.On her right, a gap was opened in the ring column, and a descending step emerged from it. Walk along it to the south for more than one kilometer, and you can see a small city, with low, simple houses squeezed among the bone-like trees. In one mass, the trees resembled the stunted skeletons of some extinct creature years ago.
Only a few people could be seen, some hurried across the square, some up the steps, as if they were late for the service.Under the magnificent dome of the church, a bell began to ring somewhere, but it was filtered through the thin air, and there was no sense of majesty.
Yueshi walked past the ring post, hanging his head, ignoring the curious eyes of the priests and cleaning staff, who were riding a beast that looked like a half-ton hedgehog.There are dozens of marginal planets similar to Payson in the entire ring network, and there are more protected bodies and nearby remote areas-they are poor and cannot attract ordinary people who are relocating at any time. was not taken into consideration.It caters to small groups such as Catholics who have come here in search of a revival of faith.At that time, the number of believers had reached millions, and Yue Shi knew it clearly.It may be less than tens of thousands now.She closed her eyes, remembering the hologram in Father Paul Durley's file.
Joystone loves the Ring.She loves the people of the Web; all their superficial selfishness and obstinacy are inherent in human nature.Joystone loves the Ring.It was from such a deep love that she knew that she must help destroy it.
She returned to the small three-door terminal, issued a simple override command to the datanet, summoned the private teleportation node, and stepped into the smell of sunshine and sea.
Maui approx.Pleasant Stone knew exactly where he was.On the hill she stood above the first station, Siri's tomb still marks the spot where they revolted more than half a century ago, though that short-lived rebellion was quickly crushed.At that time, the first stop was a small village of a few thousand people, and every festival week, pipers would welcome the return of mobile islands that had been herded to the hunting grounds of the northern Equatorial Islands.Now the first station city has been built along the island, beyond the line of sight, the arc-shaped town and the living hive extend half a kilometer in all directions, above the hills, which no longer have the best on the ocean planet Maui. vision.
But the tomb still stands.Although the Consul's grandmother's body wasn't there...never buried there...the empty cenotaph, like so many symbols of the planet, was admirable, almost awe-inspiring.
Pleasant Stone looks out from between the twin towers, past the old breakwater, where the blue lagoon turns brown, past dripping platforms and tour barges, to where the shoreline begins.Now there are no moving islands.They no longer float across the ocean in great flocks, their barksails no longer heave to the southerly wind, and the dolphins that herd them no longer leap between the white Vs of the foam.
The islands have been tamed by the inhabitants of the Web, and they are full of people.The dolphins have died—some slaughtered in battles with the military, and most jumped ashore in unbelievable mass suicides in the South China Sea, the last remaining mystery of this mysteriously shrouded race.
Pleasant Stone sat down on a low stool at the edge of the cliff and grabbed a grass stalk that she could tear or chew.Such a planet, home to tens of thousands of people, and the delicate balance achieved in the fragile ecology, became a rest resort for the first 400 million people who became the first overlord residents in ten standard years. What happened during this period?
Answer: The planet died.In other words, its soul is dead, although after some transformation, the ecological network can still operate.Planetary ecologists and environmental terraforming experts keep the outer shell alive, keep the oceans from suffocating from the inevitable garbage, sewage, oil spills, and work to minimize noise pollution and a thousand other problems that come with progress , at least to cover up these things in a whitewashed manner.Still, the Maui that the Consul as a boy had seen from here less than a century ago when he climbed the hill for his grandmother's funeral remained forever in the past.
A group of Huoying flying carpets passed overhead, and the tourists on them laughed and shouted loudly.Far above them, a huge sightseeing electromagnetic vehicle blocked the sun for a while.In the shadow that fell suddenly, Yue Shi dropped the grass stalk in his hand, and put his forearm on his knees.She remembered the consul's betrayal.She had pinned all her hopes on the consul's treachery, betting everything on the Maui native-born Shiri's scion to join the Ousters in the inevitable Battle of Hyperion.That wasn't her personal plan; Lee Hunter had done her a lot for her in decades of planning, this prudent man to send the exact man and send to negotiate with the Ousters and give him his proper place, Giving him the possibility to activate the Ouster's device, disrupting the time tides on Hyperion, thus betraying both sides.
Everything went according to plan.The Consul, who devoted his life, his wife and children's, for forty years to serving the overlord, finally started revenge, like a bomb that had been dormant for fifty years, finally exploded.
Pleasure Stone has no sympathy for betrayal.The Consul sold his soul, and he will pay a high price - a stigma that will never be forgiven - but his treason pales in comparison to Gladstone's betrayal (for which she was ready to be punished) .As the Overlord CEO, she is the symbolic leader of 150 billion souls.And in order to save mankind, she intends to betray them all.
She stood up, feeling the rheumatic pain in an old bone, and walked slowly towards the terminal.She paused at the softly humming entrance, turning her head for one last look at Maui.The breeze was blowing from the sea, but what was blowing was the stench of oil spills and refinery exhaust, Yue Shi turned his face away.
Lusus's weight hung like a steel shackle on the cloak around her shoulders.Now is the rush hour for the Central Plaza. Thousands of commuters, shopkeepers, and tourists are jostling on every sidewalk level. All kinds of people fill the kilometer-long escalator, and the air feels like it has been breathed many times. Same, very stuffy, mixed with the smell of oil and ozone in this closed system.Yue Shi ignored those expensive commercial aspects, she walked on a sidewalk, ten kilometers away was the main church of the Shrike Church.
Above the bottom of the wide staircase, there is a warning blocking field and a concealing field, shining with violet and emerald light.The church was boarded up all around and was pitch black; many of the long, thin stained-glass windows facing the central square had been smashed to pieces.Yueshi recalled the reports of the riots a few months ago, saying that the bishop and acolytes had escaped early.
She approached the interdiction field, looking through those shifting violet hazes to the stairs where Braun Lamia had brought her dying client and lover, the copy of Keats' Cyborg. Here, turn to those Shrike pastors who are waiting.Pleasant Stone had been on good terms with Braun's father; they had been like-minded early in their parliamentary careers.Congressman Brian Lamia was a man of great talent—long before Braun's mother had left the isolated provincial town of Liberty Island to appear socially, Pleasant Stone had considered him for a time. Candidates for marriage—and with his death, part of Yue Shi's youth was also buried.Byron Lamia was deeply obsessed with the core of technology. For five centuries, artificial intelligence has enslaved human beings, with a range of one thousand light years. He worked hard to liberate human beings from the shackles.It was Braun Lamia's father, Gladstone, who sensed the danger and led her to commit to it, and it would all end in the most heinous betrayal in human history.
It was also the "suicide" of MP Byron Lamia that prompted her to practice the prudence she had exercised over the years.Yue Shi didn't know if it was the secret agents of the inner core that planned the death of the congressman, or it might be the actions of other class members of the overlord to protect their own vested interests, but she was sure that Byron Lamia would never commit suicide, and it was impossible to This way abandons helpless wives and wayward daughters.Senator Lamia's last move in the Senate was to jointly propose that Hyperion be added to the Protectorate, which would allow the planet to join the Ring Network twenty standard years earlier than it currently does.After his death, the surviving co-sponsor — the newly empowered Meina Gladstone — withdrew the bill.
Pleasant Stone found a descent shaft and took it down, passing the commercial level, the residential level, the manufacturing and service level, the waste disposal and the reactor level.Both her comlog and the speakers of the descent shaft warned her that she was entering an unauthorized danger zone far below the hive.She overrode the descent rig program trying to stop her descent and turned off the warning.She continued to descend, past several levels, now devoid of paneling or light, and then through a spaghetti tangle of optical fibers, through heating and cooling pipes, through bare rock, and finally stopped down.
Pleasant Stone walked into a corridor lit only by distant glow balls and greasy firefly paint.Water dripped from a thousand cracks in the ceiling and walls, gathering in poisonous puddles.Moisture wafts from holes in the walls that may or may not connect to other corridors or private closets.Somewhere in the distance came an ultrasonic screech, like metal cutting through another metal; getting closer, the sound became an electroacoustic scream, like trash music.A man's scream came from nowhere, and a woman was laughing wildly. Her voice echoed along the shaft and pipes, turning into a metallic texture.Then came the cough of the Steel Spear Assault Rifle.
Dross hive.Yue Shi walked into the intersection of cavernous corridors and stopped to look around.Her tiny remote also dived, hovering low like a persistent angry insect.It is calling for security backup.Yue Shi repeatedly entered the override command, so that the call did not come out.
Dross hive.This is where Braun Lamia and her cyber lover hid for the final hours before setting off for the Shrike Church.There are countless underground areas like this in the ring, and the black market here can buy everything from flashback military-grade weapons, from illegal robots to bootleg Paulson therapy that will either kill you, Either give you another twenty years of youth, the chances of both are equal.Pleasant Stone turned right, down the darkest corridor.
A rat-sized, multi-legged thing sprints into a broken ventilation duct.Pleasant Stone smelled sewer water, sweat, ozone from overworked data plane decks, sweet smells of pistol propellant, vomit, mutated toxins from inferior pheromones.She walked down the hallway, wondering how dearly the planets would pay for her decisions, for what she would do, in the weeks and months ahead.
Five young people walked into the corridor and stood in front of Yueshi. Their bodies were shaped by underground basic artists, and they lost many human characteristics and looked more like animals.She stopped.
The tiny remote dangled in front of her, removing the camouflage polymer.The creature in front of her laughed when she saw that it was just a wasp-sized machine bobbing and clashing in the air.Most likely, they were too enamored of RNA tailoring to know anything about such a device.Two unrolled shock brads, another unfurled ten-centimeter steel claws, and yet another unrolled a rotating-barrel steel spear pistol.
Yueshi didn't want to fight.She knew that even if the dead heads of these scum hives didn't make a move, the tiny remote controller would take the initiative to protect her from these five people, even if there were a hundred more, she wouldn't be afraid.But she didn't want these people to die unjustly because she chose the garbage as a walking place.
"Go away," she said.
The eyes of the young men stared wide, their yellow pupils and bulbous black pupils, revealing the incisions under the hoods and the photosensitive belts of their bellies.They spread out together, formed a semicircle, and took two steps towards her.
Meina Pleasant stood up, wrapping her shawl tightly and letting her neckline drop until they could see her eyes. "Go away," she said again.
The young man hesitated, feathers and scales swaying in an invisible breeze.The tentacles of two of them trembled, and thousands of tiny sensory hairs danced.
They went away; they left as silently and swiftly as they came.After a second nothing was heard, just water droplets and distant laughter.
Yue Shi shook his head, summoned a private portal, and walked in.
Saul Winterburo and his daughter are from the land of Barna.Pleasant Stone teleports to a small terminal in their home town of Clover.It's late afternoon, and the low, white houses huddle on the lawn, perhaps with a touch of Canadian Republic Revival style, but with a rancher's practicality.The towering trees, the outstretched branches, are awe-inspiring in their DNA from the old lands.The crowd was bustling, most of them just spent a busy working day elsewhere in the ring network, and now they are hurrying home, Yueshi pulled away, wandering in the brick corridor, passing brick and stone buildings, they circled a green Grassy oval building.She glimpsed patches of farmland next to a row of houses on the left, tall green plants, maybe corn, growing luxuriantly amidst the whimpering wind, stretching to the far horizon, where the giant red sun was sinking, leaving only its last bend arc.
Yueshi walked across the campus, wondering whether this was the university where Saul once taught, but his curiosity was not too strong, so he didn't check the data network.Gas lamps were shining under the canopy of leaves, the brightest stars were beginning to appear in the spaces between the leaves, and the sky was gradually changing from blue to amber and finally to ebony.
Yue Shi has read "Abraham's Dilemma" written by Wen Tebo. In the book, he analyzed the relationship between God and human beings. One asked human beings to sacrifice their sons, and the other agreed to sacrifice their own sons.Wen Tebo explained in detail that Yahweh in the "Old Testament" is not simply testing Abraham, but also using the single vocabulary of loyalty, obedience, and sacrifice to communicate with him, so that in such a relationship, when the time is ripe for human beings understand everything.Winterberg sees the prophecies in the New Testament as a harbinger of a new phase in that relationship—one in which, for whatever reason, humans would no longer have to sacrifice their children to any god, but the Parents at that time... all parents... will sacrifice themselves in place of their children.Hence the massacres of the 20th century, the short-term exchange, the tripartite war, the fatuous and tyrannical century, and even the big mistake of 1938.
Ultimately, Wentberg talks about rejecting all sacrifices, denying any connection to God unless the two respect each other and act in good faith for the sake of mutual understanding.His writings deal with the multiple deaths of God and the need for gods to be resurrected today, as humans have created their own gods and released them into the world.
Pleasant Stone walked across an elegant stone bridge that spanned a brook that had disappeared into shadows, and only the murmur of water in the dark marked the stream's whereabouts.A soft yellow glow fell on the hand-built stone balustrades.Somewhere outside the campus, a dog barked and was stopped.Lights gleamed on the third floor of an ancient building, a gabled, roughly cobbled masonry building, completed no doubt dating back to before the Pilgrimage.
Pleasant Stone thought of Saul Winterburo, his wife Sarai, and their beautiful twenty-six-year-old daughter, returning home after a year of archaeological exploration in Hyperion and bringing back not any finds but the Shrike's Curse - Merlin's disease.Saul and Sarai watched as the woman slowly grew younger, regressed back to childhood, and back to infancy again.Later, while visiting his sister, Sarai is killed in a heartless and stupid electromagnetic car accident, leaving Saul to watch the tragedy alone.
Rachel Winterberg, her first and last birthday, will be three standard days away.
Yue Shi hit the stone with a fist, summoned a portal, and walked to another place.
Mars is at noon.For more than six centuries, conditions in the slums of Tharsis have remained unchanged.The sky above was pink, and although Pleasant Stone had wrapped her shawl tightly around her body, the air was too thin and cold for her, and there was a cloud of dust everywhere.She walked through narrow paths and cliffs, but couldn't find an open viewing point. As far as she could see, there were only clusters of huts above her head, or dripping filter towers.
There is very little vegetation here - the vast regenerated forests have either been felled for firewood or are dead and covered in red sand dunes.The paths had been trodden barefoot by twenty generations and were as hard as rock, with nothing to see between them than a few smuggled brandy cacti and clumps of parasitic spider lichen that had dug deep into the ground.
Yue Shi found a low rock and sat down, lowering his head and rubbing his knees.Groups of children, barely naked save for rags and dangling shunt sockets, gathered around to beg her for money, and when she ignored her, they giggled and ran all the way closer.
The sun is in the sky.From here, you can't see Mount Olympus or the stark and beautiful military academy that Feldman Kassad once attended.Yue Shi looked around.This is where the proud man came from.It was here that he mingled with rascals, before he was honored with honors, sanity, and troops.
Yueshi found a place where no one was around, and stepped into the portal.
The sacred forest is just as it has always been - hundreds of millions of trees exude fat and fragrance; The color; the setting sun ignited the real roof of the planet, like a sea of canopies bathed in sunlight, every leaf shining against the breeze, sending the smell of rain and wet wood to Pleasant Stone, the scent of morning dew and morning rain The water droplets flickered, and the world half a kilometer below her high platform was sleeping peacefully in darkness.
A saint approached, saw Pleasant Stone's follow-up bracelet flickering with every movement of her hand and foot, and stepped back, the tall, robed figure blending into the maze of leaves and vines.
The Saints are one of the wildest variables in Gladstone's gamble.Their sacrifice of the treeship Yggdrasil was unprecedented, unheard of, inexplicable, and disturbing.She has no shortage of potential allies in the coming war, but none more indispensable, or more inexplicable, than the Saints.Dedicated to life, to Muir, the tree's siblings wield little power throughout the web, but are highly influential—in a society devoted to self-destruction and waste, unwilling to admit its own indulgence, it Symbolizes surviving ecological awareness.
Where the hell is Het Masteen?Why did he leave the Möbius cube to the other pilgrims?
Yueshi watched the sunrise.The sky was filled with helpless hot air balloons, rescued from the massacre in the cyclone, their multicolored orbs soaring skyward like a swarm of Portuguese soldiers.The radiant spider yarn stretches out its solar-powered wings as thin as a cicada's wing, collecting sunlight.A flock of crows broke through the roof and circled skyward, their screeches setting piercing chords to the soft breeze and the hissing drizzle.The raindrops came from the west, and the sound of clanging and pounding on the leaves reminded her of her home on the Padaofa Delta and the monsoon that lasted for a hundred days. She and her brother ran out to the swamp to search for flying toads, songbirds Ai, and the parasitic vine snake, put them in small jars and took them to school to play.
Yue Shi realized it more than a hundred thousand times, and he still had time to stop it all.A full-scale commitment to combat is not inevitable right now.With the strength of the Ouster's counterattack at present, the overlord can still sit idly by.The Shrike was not yet free.There is no complete freedom.
To save the tens of billions of lives on the Ring Network, she only needs to go back to the House of Representatives, sit on the seat, and make public the conspiracy and deceit of the past thirty years, and tell the people her fears and doubts...
No.Until the plan goes wrong, everything should go according to plan.Step into the unknown.Walk into the chaotic and violent sea where even the prophets at the core of technology and those who have insight into everything can hardly make a decision.
Pleasant Stone walked across platforms, towers, ramps, and the swaying link bridges of Saints Tree.The arboreal creatures from dozens of planets and the chimpanzee shaped by Basic Art barked at her for a while, then gracefully swung the fragile vines 300 meters above the forest floor, and fled away into the distance.Outside those areas closed to sightseers and privileged guests, Pleasant Stone smelled the scent of incense, and heard the saints chanting the Gregorian-style sunrise adoration hymn distinctly.Beneath her, the ground floor came alive with light and crowd activity.The light rain in the morning had subsided, and Yue Shi returned to the upper floor, admiring the scenery there, and crossed a sixty-meter wooden suspension bridge, which connected the tree she was on to another larger tree, where Tethered are six or seven huge hot air balloons (the only means of air transport the saints are allowed to use on the Sacred Grove), floating in the air, as if they are eager to break free, and the balloons' carrying baskets are like cumbersome balloons. Brown eggs, dangling constantly, the surface of the balloon is painted and dyed into lively and lovely lifelike shapes - traditional hot air balloon, monarch butterfly, Thomas eagle, radiant spider yarn, now extinct Zeppelin, space squid, moon Moths, vultures—things so revered that they exist only in legend, never reconstructed or crafted—there are many, many more.
All of this will be destroyed if I continue.will be destroyed.
Joy Stone stood on the edge of the circular platform, clutching the railing tightly, the skin of her hands suddenly pale, highlighting her age spots cruelly.She thought of old texts she had read, long before the Pilgrims, before the age of aviation, when the nations of Europe were in their infancy, when people transported black people—Africans—from their homeland to the Western colonies as slaves. .These slaves with handcuffs and shackles curled up naked in the stinking belly of the slave ship... When they resisted and attacked their conquerors, did they ever hesitate, such actions would mean destroying the beauty of the slave ship... Or even destroy the whole of Europe?
But they still have Africa to go back to.
Meina Pleasant Stone let out a moaning and weeping sound.Turning her back on the glorious sunrise, on the chants of the new day, on the rising of the balloon—a lifelike artificial balloon—into the nascent sky, she stepped down the platform, Go into the darker lower level and summon the teleporter.
She was unable to travel to the homeland of the last pilgrim, Martin Silenus.Silenas is only one hundred and fifty years old, his body is blue due to the effects of Paulson's physical therapy, his cells have endured the bone-chilling cold of a dozen long-term frozen slumbers, and more than that, cold storage, life extension for more than four centuries.He was born in the last days of the old land, and his mother came from one of the most prominent and luxurious families. His childhood was a medley of decadence and elegance, beauty and decay: her mother chose to accompany the dying earth, leaving him alone Sent into space, hoping to pay off his family's debts, even if it meant... Later it became a fact... He will serve as a number years of private work.
Yueshi couldn't go to the old place, so she came to the gate of heaven.
The capital mudflat city.Pleasant Stone walks the cobbled streets, admiring the large old houses that jut over the narrow canals.The canals are criss-crossed, and the stone diversion channels dug out climb the mountainside of the artificial mountains, just like the scenery in Escher's engravings.Elegant trees and horsetail ferns taller than trees are crowned on the top of the mountain, lined on both sides of the wide and white avenue, and across the line of sight, around the elegant curve of the white sandy beach.Lazy tidal rolls came toward her with violet waves, scattered in every hue, before disappearing in the perfect sand.
Pleasant Stone stands in a park overlooking the mudflats' promenade.Dozens of couples and well-dressed tourists are enjoying the night air and the shade of leaves under the gas lamps there. She imagines the appearance of the planet more than three centuries ago, when the Gate of Heaven was a primitive and crude protective planet. Fully terraformed, when Martin Silenus, young, penniless, still suffering from cultural misplacement, brain damaged by cold shock from the long journey, labored here like a slave .
At that time, the Atmospheric Generating Station could provide breathable air for an area of about one hundred square kilometers, which almost reached the limit of the habitable place.The tsunami will sweep away cities, land reclamation projects and workers, and it treats people equally and shows no mercy.After the Flood, bodyguards like Silenus were sent out to dig acid canals, scrape regenerating aerobic bacteria from the maze of lung tubes beneath the mud, and dredge scum and dead bodies for the floodplains.
We've made some progress, Pleasant Stone thought, despite the inertial force of the inner core on us, despite the near-death of science, and despite our reliance on toys bestowed upon us by our own creations, which is almost fatal.
She felt dissatisfied.She had thought of visiting the homeland of the seven Hyperion pilgrims on this walk to the planets, though she knew it would be utterly futile.The Gate of Heaven is the place where Silenas learned to write real poetry when his brain was temporarily damaged and his language was lacking, but this is not his home.
Yue Shi ignored the melodious music from the concert on the seaside boulevard, ignored the electromagnetic buses passing by like migratory birds, ignored the pleasant air and soft light, she summoned the portal and ordered It transmits itself to Earth's satellite.moon.
But instead of activating the teleporter, her comlog issued a warning that it was dangerous to go there.But she entered an override command.
Pleasant Stone's tiny remote controller buzzed into view, and a tiny voice inside the implant told her that it wasn't a good idea for the CEO to go to such an unstable place.But she turned off the warning.
Even the teleportation portal itself was disobedient to her choice, and in the end she had to use the Universal Card to do it manually.
The long-distance portal appeared, and Yue Shi walked in.
The only habitable places on the old moon are the mountain peaks and dark areas on the surface, which are specially reserved for the military Masada celebration. Yueshi stepped out of the door and arrived here.Both the observation deck and the marching field were empty.The tenth-level containment field blurred the starry sky and the distant edge wall. Yueshi saw that the heat from the earth's core poured out of the terrible gravity tide melted the distant mountains, and the magma melted together and flowed into the new ocean.
She walked across a flat gray sand, feeling the gentle gravity, and felt like flying.She felt like a saint's balloon, lightly tethered, eager to fly away.She tried to suppress the urge to jump, to restrain herself from making big leaps, but even so, her steps were frivolous, and the dust raised fantastic patterns behind her.
The air was so thin under the dome of the containment field that Pleasant found himself shivering despite the heating elements under the cape he wore.She stood for a long time in the middle of this unremarkable plain, trying to imagine the moon at that time, the place where human beings staggered out of the cradle with their long first steps.But the observation deck and equipment shed of the military headquarters disturbed her thoughts, she really couldn't imagine those scenes, finally she raised her head and looked at her real purpose of coming here.
The old ground hangs in the dark space.But that wasn't Old Earth, of course, just the pulsating shock sphere and remnants of the globular nebula that had once been part of Old Earth.The mass of matter was very bright, brighter than any star that could be seen even in the rarest clear night sky on Patao's hair, but this brightness carried an inexplicable and ominous meaning, against the marl gray A pale light casts on the field.
Yue Shi stood there, staring ahead.She'd never been here before, purposefully not, and now she's here, desperate to feel something, to hear something, like a warning, or a mystical intuition, or just a feeling of mourning, but these Everything hides from her.
She can't hear anything.
She stood where she was for a few minutes, a few thoughts running through her head, feeling her ears and nose start to freeze, and she decided to leave.Whaleheart should be near dawn.
Yueshi activated the portal, and took a last look back. At this moment, less than ten meters away, another mobile long-distance transmission gate appeared in illusion.She stopped.Fewer than five people in the ring have the right to privately reach Earth's satellites.
The tiny remote hummed down and floated between her and the person coming out of the portal.
It was Lee Hunter who walked out. He looked around, shivering with cold, and then walked towards her quickly.His voice came from the thin air, shrill and thin, like a child talking, which made people laugh.
"Madam CEO, you must go back immediately. The Ousters have managed to break through the line of defense through an amazing counterattack."
Yue Shi sighed.She knew this would be the next step. "Well," she said, "has Hyperion fallen into enemy hands? Can we still evacuate the troops there?"
Hunter shook his head.His lips were almost purple from the cold. "You didn't understand," came the assistant's weak voice, "it's not just Hyperion. The Ousters launched an attack in more than ten locations at the same time. They've invaded the Ring!"
The shock that these words brought to Meina Yueshi was stronger than the coldness of the moon, and she suddenly felt icy cold all over her body, and she was stunned.She nodded, wrapped her shawl tightly around her, and walked across the porch into a world that would never be the same again.
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