"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles of Solace 3 - Shores of Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)
And what the hell is the point of a preflight safety check?she asked herself.What safety issue am I going to find that’s going to make taking off more dangerous than staying here seven—make it six—more minutes? Besides, if there were anything wrong, how the hell was she going to be able to fix it?
She finished clearing the mold off the control panel as best she could and wished she could do something to clear her mind as well. Mars was getting to her, no doubt about it. Go straight to preflight prep and just hope the mold hadn’t gotten into anything important just yet. Pressurize main propellant tank. Power to stabilizers. Nozzle temperature low but inside tolerance. Check trim-tank levels. Engine gimbal check, solid-state gyro check. Pressure to the main tank wasn’t coming up very fast. Was there a leak somewhere, or a valve stuck? She cycled the switches on and off a couple of times, and was rewarded with a much-improved rate of pressurization.Some crud in the line, she told herself.Don’t ask yourself where it’s from or what it is. Just be glad it’s gone and don’t wonder if more is on the way. Time check—three minutes thirty seconds to go. Basic preflight sequence complete.Okay. Let the main tank get to pressure, and let’s just go.
She watched the tank-pressure gauge, cheering it on, urging the numbers to rise. And they did so, quite briskly, for a little while, nearly edging over into low-acceptable range before slowing even more abruptly than before.
Something was plainly not right in the tank-pressure system. But there was no time to troubleshoot, no time to figure it out—and besides, there was also a very good chance that whatever was wrong would only get worse as the mold infiltrated farther into whatever it was jamming.
Two minutes left, then the landscape would open up with a bang. She cycled the tank-pressure switches again, and once again, the jolt was enough to knock the obstruction loose—for the moment. The tank pressure teetered on the low end of the acceptable range—and then jumped over, suddenly sailing right up into the middle of the preferred range.
Kalani wasted no time questioning the gift she had been given. Whatever had nudged the system back to normal performance could nudge it back out at any time.
She powered up the main thruster and cranked it up to full throttle. She was slammed down into her couch as the lander shot up into the sky. The moment the lander was in motion, Kalani knew it was going too far, too fast. She throttled down to 1 percent, not daring to shut the thruster off completely for fear of not being able to restart it in midair. The lander streaked upward, riding its momentum, reaching the apex of its initial boost about three thousand meters up. Kalani, vastly relieved that the ship had boosted at all, was tempted to stay right there, but she knew that really was a little too high for a good view of the show that was about to begin. Best to settle in a little lower. She pushed forward on the main throttle, again powering the thruster up—or at least intending to do so.
For a long, sickening moment, the thruster did not respond to her commands. Instead of throttling up, it held at 1 percent, barely ticking over. The lander started to fall, faster and farther than Kalani had intended. She jammed the throttle hard against the stop, full power, and felt it kick in hard. She eased down again, slowly, to about one-third power. For whatever reason, the thruster chose that moment to respond properly to the controls. Kalani put on the brakes, slowly but surely, and came to a high-hover. The flight instructors called it a “landing on air”—a complete halt in midair. Pilots called it the most inefficient of all possible maneuvers. The lander was burning irreplaceable propellant in order to remain motionless.
And motionless in the wrong place. Somehow she had skewed about a half kilometer west, and was a good thousand meters lower than she wanted to be. She checked the countdown. Thirty seconds to go. She barely had time to lock the lander’s cameras in on the temple and the surrounding area. Twenty seconds.Some more altitude would be a good idea right now. She throttled up, and felt that same sickening delay from the thruster before it finally responded to commands. What the hell was wrong? The lander oozed slowly upward. Kalani resisted the urge to slam the throttle forward again. The controls were in bad enough shape without her roughing them up needlessly.
Fifteen seconds. Ten seconds. She throttled back down again, as gently as she could, compensating reasonably well for the delay in response. The lander was at seven hundred meters, still much lower than Kalani had intended—but two hundred meters better than five hundred.
Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.
Nothing. The lander hung over a landscape quiet enough for a tomb, let alone a temple. The clocks kept counting forward from zero, as Kalani wondered frantically what to do. What had happened? Had she set the timer wrong?One. Had the mold eaten that much of the explosive?Two. Should she go down and check?Three. Her orders gave her no option, but the information she had already was vital.Four. It would be suicidal to go back. Those charges could still blow any second.Fi—
The little ship shuddered and lurched from side to side, just barely holding upright. The racket was terrifying as the hull was peppered with dust and small gravel. Only dumb luck kept the larger chunks of flying rock clear of the lander.
Down below, there was a smoking, dust-choked crater where the temple had been. Suddenly, a ruler-straight fissure in the ground erupted, drawing a line in the sand, an arrow pointing straight back toward Mariner City. The ground surged up, throwing fresh gouts of angry orange fire, more fountains of dust and rock and mold chunks into the sky. The tunnel charges had gone off, exactly as the placard had threatened—or promised.
The lander’s viewports were blinded by the upwelling dust and smoke. More debris struck the hull, and the dull shriek of three or four alarms started sounding. Kalani had to fight hard to hold the ship under control. Finally, she brought it back down to a steady high-hover. But with the surface below completely obscured, there was nothing left to record, and certainly no further reason to stay where she was.Past time to get out, she told herself. She had everything she had come for, and much more besides.
She throttled up the main thruster one more time, and again felt that slow, sickening delay between command and response. She nosed the ship over to point due east and started the run for orbit.
If she was reading the clues properly, then the Chronologic Patrol was likely about to face the biggest threat in its very long history. The hunt she had started would continue.
But she had learned about more than threats down there.
The Dark Museum had taught her a great deal about the Chronologic Patrol as well—and Kalani Temblar was far from sure she was happy with what she knew. The Chronologic Patrol was supposed to keep the past safe from the future—but what she had seen in the Dark Museum told her it was spending a great deal of effort to suppress all change, in effect to keep the future from happening.
Behind and below her, secondary explosions boomed and rumbled across the ruined land. Ahead of her, the transport awaited, then headquarters on the Moon. From there, her quest would continue—but the way forward seemed no clearer than the chaos she left in her wake.
The little ship streaked upward toward orbit.
Chapter Two
PRESSURIZED
ENVIRONMENTS
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