《The Last Defender 》作者：- Brian J. Clarke【EPUB】

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THE LAST DEFENDER J. BRIAN CLARKE A billion kilometers across, the enormous spiral of matter flares incandescent as its substance is inconceivably compressed and energized just before it disappears forever below the event horizon of the black hole. The Ark is already being drawn inexorably inward; subject to nature's relentless laws as surely as every atom within range of the voracious center. The only choice for the thousands aboard the converted asteroid seems to be in the manner of their dying. Quickly, as their bodies become stretched and torn apart by the tidal forces of the hole. Or slowly and without hope, on the cratered surface of a tiny world which eons ago was captured and spun into an elongated orbit about the fearsome primary. Yet even among the doomed, there are optimists— ' The theory says it can be done!' ' You forget the calculations are impossibly complex. There is not enough time.' ' Nevertheless we will depart at the appointed moment. The Giver will guide our steering.' ' I wish you luck, brother. Some of us have chosen to go to the planetoid, where time will perhaps grant us a better way.' ' Time belongs to the Giver. He will grant you nothing.' ' Or everything.' The moment comes. Like a cloud of disturbed locusts thousands of tiny space craft separate from the Ark, rotate, and then spiral toward the primary along a course which leads them high above the ecliptic. Again they rotate, and with drives flaring at full thrust the little ships hurtle suicidally down the lines of force which reach out from the spinning nothingness at the center. The ships vanish. Months later, two hundred more ships rise;