"Allen, Roger Macbride - Allies And Aliens 1 - Torch Of Honor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

Climbing, especially rock climbing, is composed of pauses and lunges. You look over the rock face and rehearse, time and time again in your mind, which limb you will move first, and which will follow. You wait, and work up the will to do it. Perhaps you try the very beginning of the move a time or two, not even moving your hand or foot from the rock, just relaxing the hold one arm has on the rock, trying to see if your other arm or your legs can hold you in place until the first arm can get to where it's going. Maybe you find the move can't work, and you sweat out the close call for a moment until you try some other way. Then, finally, when there is no reason left for pausing, you lunge, and move as quickly and smoothly as you can to the next set of handholds and footholds, hoping they will support you. Sometimes they do.
It was crawl and clamber, climb and hang, pause and lunge. Twice my handholds and footholds weren't good enough; I fell off the inward sloping cliff and had to swing up like a pendulum again and get back onto it. Then I would cling to the rock, wait out the shakes, and proceed.
Finally the rock bubble was directly below me, half a meter away. I fired a rope spike into the face of the cliff, shot another into the side of the bubble, clamped the two reels short, and clipped the ends of the two ropes together. I fired another short rope to hold myself to the cliff more securely, then took a five-minute break and got to work on the bubble.
I pulled my hand laser from its holster, set it on narrow beam, and fired it straight into the bubble. It took about a second and a half for the beam to pierce the bubble's surface, and then the trapped gas that had formed the bubble jetted out, carrying with it a fine cloud of rock dust that quickly dispersed. I cut along the surface of the bubble in a rough circle with a rope spike in its center.
In 15 minutes I had a manhole-sized piece of rock free of the bubble. I holstered the nearly exhausted laser and pulled on the line that held the manhole cover. With a bit of straining and effort, and a screeching like squeaking chalk that was transmitted through the rock and carried into my suit, the rock cover came off. When I released it, it swung back and forth for a few seconds, then hung quietly off to counterspinward, held oddly off center by the unsettling Coriolis effect of the satellite's spin.
I pulled the hose connections to my backpack again and detached myself from it. I shoved the backpack into the hole first, then crawled in myself.
I was in. I had made it this far. At least I was off that cliff. Rock under my feet, instead of off to one side.
I undipped myself from all the lines that held me to the cliff, and used one of them to lasso-on the third try-the rope holding the manhole cover. I pulled it back in toward me, fired a rope spike into its inside surface, and wrapped the line around my forearm.
Steadying the cover with one hand and wishing I had three hands, I pulled out the can of rock sealant and sprayed the thick gunk on the cover and on the lip of the hole.
I ducked back into the hole, switched on my helmet light, then pulled the cover back into place and gave it a good hard yank to give the sealant a chance. For good measure, I sprayed another coat of the stuff around the inside of the cover.
It took the sealant a few minutes to set. I used the time to get the life-support unit detached from the maneuvering backpack and strapped to me by itself. I hooked the hoses up after being off them for about five minutes; that is about the practical limit before you start seeing spots in front of your eyes from lack of air.
I dug one last tool from the gear bag hooked to the backpack-a rockeater. It was a simple, powerful device, and by far the biggest gadget I had taken with me. I set it against the wall opposite the one I had come in. On the other side of that wall lay the interior of this world. I switched it on. Three sets of spinning, industrial diamond-tipped teeth bit into the rock face. The rock was reduced to a fine dust and funneled into an exhaust tube. I paused for a moment to shove the end of the tube into the far side of the bubble.
Gritting my teeth, I started up the drill again and dug it into the rock. The sound, transmitted through the surrounding rock and into my suit, was the devil's own shrilling, keening racket. It dug a round tunnel about half a meter in diameter. In spite of the exhaust tube, the dust soon managed to cover my helmet, and I had to pause frequently to brush it off.
The hole grew slowly. In 20 tooth-rattling minutes, I had dug about a meter into the rock. I had no idea how thick the walls were, and was prepared to spend long hours with that screaming machine and the rock dust.
But it was less than an hour later that the rockeater almost skipped out of my hands and the last of the rock wall collapsed in front of it. I shut it off as the interior atmosphere of Vapaus whooshed into the vacuum of my rock bubble, jetting up great clouds of dust that took a few minutes to settle. I worried that the dust cloud might be seen, but when it cleared, I saw the satellite's interior was dark. It was night in Vapaus.
I pulled the rockeater back down the hole it had made and stashed it in the now rather cluttered bubble, then crawled up the smooth-sided tunnel and poked my head out. I cracked open my helmet and breathed in Vapaus's sweet air.
It was 42 days-1,000 hours-from the moment the signal beacon had awakened us from a sound sleep. I was inside Vapaus. Now came the hard part.

CHAPTER FOUR

I crawled back into the rock bubble and stripped off my pressure suit. It felt remarkably good to be out of it. I had been inside the thing for nearly two-and-a-half days by that time, and was looking forward to smelling something besides myself. I peeled down to skin and realized that I was still going to be smelling essence of me for a while. I needed a bath pretty badly. I had brought along one set of coveralls to change into once I ditched the suit, and I got into them now, reluctant to put clean clothes over dirty skin.
The rock bubble was not a good headquarters. It was impossible to stand up without using one hand to balance myself. The inside of the bubble was sort of egg-shaped, with the narrower end at the bottom. It was half full of sneeze-making rock dust, and the rock dust was full of abandoned gear. It was easy to fall over.
The seal around my manhole cover seemed to be holding, but I gave it an extra dollop of rock sealant anyway. I didn't like the idea of taking chances with somebody else's air supply-I had spent a large portion of my life breathing canned air, and that made me very sensitive to the problem.
A growing flood of light was pouring into the tunnel from the satellite's interior. Day was coming to Vapaus.
It was clearly impossible to risk being seen climbing down the interior cliff in broad daylight. I would have to wait for nightfall. That meant I could sleep now, and I needed it. I detached the legs (pants, I guess you'd call them) from my pressure suit, rolled them up into a pillow of sorts, and stretched out to sleep in the tunnel.
Toward evening, I woke, as stiff as a board, and retreated to the bubble to do some setting up exercises. Then I prepared to leave.
I set a steel spike in the roof of my tunnel and attached a line, which ended in an electromagnet, to the spike. The electromagnet was switched on and off by a radio link switch. I gave the button a test. The magnet and the line attached to it fell away from the roof. I caught them before they could go over the edge, reset the magnet, set it back in place, and gave it a good hard tug. It would hold.
I had climbed the outside of the cliff the night before. Now I got ready to start climbing down the inside of the same wall. I left behind my pressure suit, backpack, the rockeater, and all the other gadgetry, and took just the coveralls and what was in their pockets. Before I went down, I looked out across the face of Vapaus.
Dusk was just setting in that great cylindrical plain. Light was provided to the interior by a powerful spherical "sun," made up of thousands of individual lamps, which hung at the exact center of the world, floating in the zero-gee zone at the axis. It was anchored to the fore and aft cliffs by strong cables, which did not support its weight (in the axial zone, it had none), but simply kept it from floating off the centerline. This interior "sun" was dimming now and was the red of a true sun seen at dusk. Houselights were coming on in the plains below.
I was surprised by how easily I accepted this inside-out world. Maybe this was because I seen photos of other such places before, but I think it was more because it looked right, and natural. The scale was too vast to think of it as man-made. It was just as magnificent a vista as the Grand Canyon or Valles Marineris, but far more hospitable.
The greensward girdled Vapaus completely. Gentle hills were covered with lush grasses and graced by the hint of color lent by flowers too far off to be seen. Trees grew in profusion below my feet, in a sweeping arc of forest that climbed the sides of the world and continued unbroken over my head.
Rivers flowed in the sky as well, one directly above me. I could not see its origin, as it was shrouded in cloud, but I traced its progress toward the sea, which wrapped itself around the middle ground of the satellite's interior. Twin bands of clouds, which, like the central sea, ran clear around the world, hid the ground level from view at either end of the plain. These cloud bands started flat up against the fore and aft cliffs and extended about a quarter kilometer in toward the middle of the cylinder, steely grey boundaries to the green and blue splendor they framed.
As I started down the aft cliff, this band of cloud was below my feet. These clouds, and the gathering darkness, were enough to shield my movements from observation.
The fore and aft walls, or cliffs, were hollow dome-shapes. Measured along the axis of the world, Vapaus was about 11 kilometers from end to end. Measured at the base of the cliffs, it was about 10 klicks. This meant that the climb down the outside had been against a constant overhang, but that climbing down the interior wall brought you down a steadily gentler slope. By the time I reached the end of the line, I was able to scramble down with a fair degree of confidence, even in the dark.
I used the radio relay switch to shut off the electromagnet that held my line, and it instantly started to drop in the most peculiar fashion. As I've said, the apparent gravity inside a rotating cylinder like Vapaus increases from zero at the axis to its maximum at the walls of the cylinder. This meant, of course, that the top of the rope fell more slowly than the bottom of the rope.
There was another odd effect as well: the spin of such a world isn't imparted to a falling object inside it. The object falls in a straight line toward the surface. But to an observer on that surface, who is carried by the spin of the world, a falling object seems to sheer away from the direction of spin. These two oddities came together to give that falling rope the strangest snake dance of a fall I've ever seen. I coiled in the line and stuffed it in a crack in the rock.
It was silly, I knew, but I felt safer climbing down the inner wall than I had climbing down the outside. It was, in some insane way, reassuring to know that if I slipped, I would tumble "only" a kilometer or so down the inside instead of out into empty space on the outside.
It actually was fairly safe. The cliff wall was full of cracks, nooks, and crevices: I had no trouble finding handholds. I quickly descended into the band of clouds that clung to the cliff wall. The wall grew clammy and slippery, and soon I was low enough for rain to start falling. The mist and rain soaked clear through my light coveralls. I noticed the air was a bit cool for my tastes as I got nearer the surface. That made sense-Finns would like it cold. The air grew denser, too. The last 50 meters or so of the climb I just slid and skidded down the pile of loose rock and pebbles that had accumulated at the bottom of the cliff.
Finally I reached level ground and looked back up the way I had come. It is always satisfying to look back at pulling off a hare-brained scheme once it has worked, and I felt sure no one could possibly have anticipated this one. The Guardians would guard the airlocks at the forward end, not here.
I squelched my way through the rain-soaked grass at the base of the aft cliff and headed in, toward the inhabited parts of the satellite.
There is a man who lives on the end of a pleasant lane near the aft cliff who may be wondering to this day what happened to the pants, shirt, and food that vanished that night. Whoever he is, thank you. It all went to a good cause. League of Planets Survey Service issue coveralls were not the thing to wear in those parts, and the black bread was delicious. After the snack, I buried the coveralls and moved on.
Soon I found myself at a transport station of some kind. I hung back and watched the proceedings. It seemed simple enough. Brightly lit rail cars were running along a ground-level monorail, arriving about once every five minutes. They stopped, opened their doors, waited about 30 seconds for passengers, shut their doors, and zipped off into the night.
Looking up into the sky, or rather at the land that hung over my head, I spotted the lights of other rail cars sliding silently along in the darkness here and there, like glowworms far off.
One of the cars crossed the central sea, and its cabin lights were caught and reflected by the water, casting a soft burst of light that vanished almost at once.
At this time of night, there were no other riders at this remote station. I stepped aboard. The doors slid shut with a whoosh and a click, and the car rolled forward smoothly.
I stared out the window, eager to see as much of the strangely upside-down landscape as I could in the darkness. Other passengers got on at the next stop. In the tradition of rapid-transit riders everywhere, I ignored them, and they ignored me.
No one was waiting at the next few stops, and we drew near a cluster of lovely towers that stood by the shore of the central sea.
The car stopped, and two surly-looking men in dark grey uniforms shooed other passengers away and stomped on before anyone else, swaggering with their thumbs thrust into their belts, their hands near vicious-looking laser pistols.
The enemy! Up until this moment, the Guardians had been academic, unknown. Now they were here, real, in front of me. I was sitting in the seat nearest the door. One of them came up to me and hooked a thumb toward the far end of the car. I didn't respond. Maybe I was too intent on looking him over. In any event, I nearly blew the whole game right there.
"What's the matter, boy?" the soldier growled. He spoke English with a flat, hard, clipped accent. "Don't want to share your seat?" He stepped closer, leering at me. "Huh?"