Read Online Beastchild by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online
Authors: Dean Koontz
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other races considered such places at least undesirable, and at worst intolerable). Their rate of expansion into the many-peopled stars was slow by some standards, but the humans explained that they had their own method of pioneering. It was a not-so-polite way of telling everyone else to mind their business.
Fifty years came and went, and the humans that the naoli-and the other races-saw were still as withdrawn, cool, and unfriendly as ever. By the end of the second fifty years, various disputes arose between the naoli and the humans over trade routes and colony claims and half a hundred other things more petty. In not one case, could the races reach agreement. The humans began to settle many problems by force, the most expedient route -and the most illegal in the eyes of the naoli.
Eventually: the war.
It was not necessary to convince Hulann that the war was essential to the naoli's survival. He had always carried with him the memory of those humans on the Tagasa, the strange, smooth-skinned, hairy creatures with the brooding eyes and the quiet, solemn faces that argued for a shrewd and wicked mind within their skulls.
Long ago.
And this was the Here and Now. And Leo was beside him, sleeping, curled feotally. Why was the boy different? Why was the boy easy to reach? This was, as far as he knew, the first instance of intercommunication between naoli and man in the hundred and eighty years of their acquaintance. It went against all that was known of humans. Yet, here they were.
He abruptly broke his train of thought. It was leading him back through the events of the last two days, and he did not want to be plagued with those things again.
He blinked his large eyes and looked carefully through the wet glass at the road and the landscape around it. If anything, it was snowing harder now than when they had left Boston. Long, almost impenetrable walls of snow swirled by on both sides while the craft knifed between them, kicked up an even whiter inferno behind as its own draughts stirred the fluff on the road surface. The markers at the edges of the throughway were drifted over here and there. Elsewhere, just their orange, phosphorescent caps peaked out. The direction signs suspended overhead were collecting a film of the hard driven snow, becoming increasingly difficult to read.
If the storm grew worse and the drifts covered the roadbed, they would founder. A shuttlecraft could cross snow-as long as it was light enough to blow out of the way and give the down-draught a clear blow surface on the roadbed. Hard-packed drifts created an uneven surface, which invariably led to disaster.
Near Warren, in the human province of Pennsylvania, moving at a hundred and ninety miles an hour toward the province of Ohio, disaster stopped waiting and leapt at them
Hulann was squinting through the snow, paying strict attention to the highway in order to keep his mind off things he would rather not ponder. It was this extra attentiveness that saved their lives. Had he been lax, he would not have seen the glow of the crater
He made out a light, green flickering between the sheets of white that whirled by him. Then, through a part in the curtain of the storm, a brilliant ripple of emerald fire shot out into the distance.
He braked, fought the wheel to keep the tilted blowers from carrying them toward the guardrails and into the fields beyond.
The blades whined, ground as if tearing through metal grit. The shuttle bumped, started a spin. They were going backwards now toward the shimmering green fire.
Then they were around, had swung an entire three hundred and sixty degrees.
He steadied them.
The speedometer read fifty miles an hour. The edge of the crater was only a few hundred yards away. He could see the great black depression, the sheets of energy shimmering and exploding across its vast
Fifty years came and went, and the humans that the naoli-and the other races-saw were still as withdrawn, cool, and unfriendly as ever. By the end of the second fifty years, various disputes arose between the naoli and the humans over trade routes and colony claims and half a hundred other things more petty. In not one case, could the races reach agreement. The humans began to settle many problems by force, the most expedient route -and the most illegal in the eyes of the naoli.
Eventually: the war.
It was not necessary to convince Hulann that the war was essential to the naoli's survival. He had always carried with him the memory of those humans on the Tagasa, the strange, smooth-skinned, hairy creatures with the brooding eyes and the quiet, solemn faces that argued for a shrewd and wicked mind within their skulls.
Long ago.
And this was the Here and Now. And Leo was beside him, sleeping, curled feotally. Why was the boy different? Why was the boy easy to reach? This was, as far as he knew, the first instance of intercommunication between naoli and man in the hundred and eighty years of their acquaintance. It went against all that was known of humans. Yet, here they were.
He abruptly broke his train of thought. It was leading him back through the events of the last two days, and he did not want to be plagued with those things again.
He blinked his large eyes and looked carefully through the wet glass at the road and the landscape around it. If anything, it was snowing harder now than when they had left Boston. Long, almost impenetrable walls of snow swirled by on both sides while the craft knifed between them, kicked up an even whiter inferno behind as its own draughts stirred the fluff on the road surface. The markers at the edges of the throughway were drifted over here and there. Elsewhere, just their orange, phosphorescent caps peaked out. The direction signs suspended overhead were collecting a film of the hard driven snow, becoming increasingly difficult to read.
If the storm grew worse and the drifts covered the roadbed, they would founder. A shuttlecraft could cross snow-as long as it was light enough to blow out of the way and give the down-draught a clear blow surface on the roadbed. Hard-packed drifts created an uneven surface, which invariably led to disaster.
Near Warren, in the human province of Pennsylvania, moving at a hundred and ninety miles an hour toward the province of Ohio, disaster stopped waiting and leapt at them
Hulann was squinting through the snow, paying strict attention to the highway in order to keep his mind off things he would rather not ponder. It was this extra attentiveness that saved their lives. Had he been lax, he would not have seen the glow of the crater
He made out a light, green flickering between the sheets of white that whirled by him. Then, through a part in the curtain of the storm, a brilliant ripple of emerald fire shot out into the distance.
He braked, fought the wheel to keep the tilted blowers from carrying them toward the guardrails and into the fields beyond.
The blades whined, ground as if tearing through metal grit. The shuttle bumped, started a spin. They were going backwards now toward the shimmering green fire.
Then they were around, had swung an entire three hundred and sixty degrees.
He steadied them.
The speedometer read fifty miles an hour. The edge of the crater was only a few hundred yards away. He could see the great black depression, the sheets of energy shimmering and exploding across its vast
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