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

Self consciously, I stood as well. "I so volunteer," I said hoarsely.
Joslyn remained seated and looked carefully at each of us. "I, too, so volunteer."
There was a long pause. I felt then, and felt for a long time afterward, that things had come too fast. Now our lives were staked to the Survey. LPSS 41 could be handled by two people, but it would be very close indeed. The silence held for a long time.
"Well, thank God for that," Pete declared, snapping the tension. "Now maybe you can serve all of us a drink, Captain."
"An excellent suggestion, Mr. Gesseti." Driscoll pulled out three more glasses and poured.
Pete took his glass and raised it. With a twinkle in his eye, he offered a toast. "To secrets. And to knowing when to have them, and knowing why to keep them."
"To secrets," the rest of us repeated, and then we all drank. We were conspirators now; for whatever reasons, we had just agreed to hijack our own fleet.
"One more point," Pete said. "Mac, I don't want to see you piloting a nameless number through space. You have to name it."
"Her," Joslyn and Driscoll corrected in unison.
"So I do," I said. I had to think for only the briefest of moments. "My friends, I ask you to drink to the League of Planets Survey Ship Joslyn Marie."
"Mac!" Joslyn cried, very much taken aback. "Don't you dare!"
"Quiet there, Lieutenant," Driscoll said. "Never argue with a man when he's putting your name in lights."
And so, we drank to the newly christened ship.
Joslyn got her revenge on me, though. The people from the planet Kennedy are edgy about being called "American." Objectively, of course, if we aren't American, we're doing a damn fine imitation. Anyway, a week later I discovered that someone had christened the Joslyn Marie's three auxiliary craft Stars, Stripes, and Uncle Sam. Worse, Stars had gotten a paint job consisting of huge white stars on a blue background, Stripes had been covered with red and white stripes, and Uncle Sam had both. The first time I brought the newly emblazoned Stars down to the surface of Columbia, it seemed to me as though a stunned silence hung over the ground crew. I ignored it as best I could and went looking for Joslyn, wondering if I could clap her in irons for artistic insubordination. It promised to be an interesting trip.

CHAPTER TWO

The next morning a "Revised Crew Lists" notice was posted. The first lines read:
LPSS 41 "Joslyn Marie" Larson, T.M. Cmdr. (commanding)
Larson, J.M., 1st Lt. Volunteer Crew-Billet Complete.
Driscoll had found Girogi Koenig willing to command LPSS 42, and the two empty billets needed to "complete" the crew were filled within four hours of their being posted.
The rest of the ships were listed as well, initially with no crew other than commanders. In 12 hours, LPSS 43, 44, 45, 46, and 48 were listed as Billet Complete. In 30 hours, all ten ships were so listed. As nearly as I could figure, every single person volunteered-and volunteered for the ship that Driscoll intended him or her for. Certainly, the ships with crews of four each had one of the lowest-ranking members of the surviving class aboard, with some of the higher-ups there to back them up. The three-crew ships were staffed by the middle-ranking class members. All the scuttlebutt I could pick up indicated that Driscoll hadn't coerced anyone else into volunteering. I guess she knew her command.
Survey base was soon filled with the roar of launching auxiliary craft ferrying supplies, instruments, luggage, and incidentals up to the orbiting ships. The parts depot was stripped bare in 50 hours, until the base XO ordered all spares returned to the depot for proper distribution. While I can say that the loyal crew of the J.M. returned nearly everything we hadn't installed yet, I can't speak for the other ships. A few aux craft made the run to Kennedy for long-store food that didn't taste like cardboard. We all chipped in on that one.
Every comm channel was jammed with carefully censored goodbye messages to every planet in the League- and none of the messages explained why we were launching so suddenly.
Driscoll was trying to keep the loss of the Venera under the tightest wrap possible for as long as possible. She knew perfectly well that there would be a leak sooner or later. Regret-to-inform 'grams had already gone out to the next of kin, of course. These said nothing more than that a son or a daughter, a niece or a nephew, a grandchild, a spouse, had died in the honorable performance of his or her duties. No mention of how, or when, or where, simply a statement that, owing to circumstances beyond human control, the body could not be returned for burial.
If word leaked, and someone higher up bothered to see what was going on at Survey Training Base, you could bet the launching of the Survey Ships would have been stopped cold. For good.
There was hope, there was a reasonable chance, that the risks Driscoll was running could pay off. The Survey Ships could, in theory, be operated by one person-if everything worked perfectly-and two or three could handle the job under a great many circumstances. A crew of nine was a safety measure, a morale improver, a redundancy system. The mission rules for a crew of nine required that at least three people remain aboard and retain at least one auxiliary ship while the others were on an exploratory job. Now that rule was out the window, or else no one could ever have left the ships. So were a lot of similar regs. All was now up to the commander's discretion.
Driscoll called all the commanders to a meeting to cover such points. Her basic orders were quite simple: gather and return to base as much information as possible without risking your command. Bring the ship back in one piece. Find some nice real estate, poke around a little, learn what you can out there-but bring that ship back!!
The first explorations of the League of Planets Survey Service were going to be good publicity. That was a direct order.
The astrogation section was working around the clock, cooking up courses for us. Interstellar travel was a game of three-dimensional billiards, using the gravity field of one star to whip the ship around and accelerate it toward a new target. The trick was to get the ships not only to the right star, but with a manageable relative velocity, and more or less in the plane of the planetary system (which could be roughly determined by using the Doppler-shift measurements of the star to figure the plane of the star's rotation, which rotation was, God willing, the plane and direction the planetary system moved in). It was a tricky way to fly, but we didn't have the fuel to do it any other way.
Then came the physical checkout of the ships themselves. That was what kept me awake nights. Had I or had I not gotten a proper reading on the fuel pump pressure in the number three oxy tank? Did that over-voltage mean anything? What about the air plant? One bright point was that we ended up spending most nights on the J.M., which meant working and sleeping in zero-gee. That helped a lot.
The ship was soon in fine fettle, but would it stay that way until we got back? The astrogation team had given us a course that would have the J.M. light years from the nearest shipyard for the next 13,000 hours-about a year and a half, Earthside. Joz and I checked out every primary, secondary, and tertiary backup system every step of the way, then put the diagnostic computer programs through their paces just as thoroughly. Then we used the diagnostics to check all our handiwork. Slowly, we squeezed the bugs out.
By the time Joslyn closed down the last access panel and wiped the grease off her nose with an even greasier hand, we had a taut ship. We were proud of her. "Mac," Joslyn said, "I think I can forgive your naming this old girl after me. She is a love."
"I agree. But I'm sure you're a lot more fun on a date." I was mighty happy with both Joslyn Maries. The one with the nice smile cuddled into my arms and gave me a happy kiss, then settled herself over my lap (it would have been into my lap, but we were in zero-gee at the time. Nice thing about zero-gee: laps don't get tired). I stretched out on my command couch and peeked around Joslyn to see a green board. The ship behind that board was a beaut.
The J.M. was about 90 meters from stem to stern. At the stern were the three great fusion rocket engines and the support gear for them. Directly forward of the engines was a central core hydrogen tank surrounded by six strap-on fuel tanks. The strap-ons were not to be jettisoned; the J.M. could sidle up to a space-going hunk of ice-a comet or whatever-and tank up by extracting hydrogen from it. Above the tankage section was an exercise deck. Like the rest of the ship, it was a cylinder, 15 meters in diameter. Its hatchways were set in its centerline, about which it spun to provide a simulated gravity to exercise in. Above this were two decks of staterooms-plumbing, a galley, a library nook, an entertainment screen, and so forth. The topmost deck was the command center, where Joz and I were now. Here were control centers for the planned nine crew members, most of them redundant in one way or another to the primary command chair, where I sat. Joz was to have the pilot's hotseat when we were maneuvering.
Above our heads were the main docking and extravehicular-activity airlock sections. Docked nose-to-nose with the Joslyn Marie, and thus flying stern-first when docked to the main ship, was the large, blunt-cone shape of the large ballistic lander, Uncle Sam. Access tunnels led from here back down the length of the ship to the docking ports of Stars and Stripes, which sat atop the number one and number four outboard fuel tanks. Unlike Uncle Sam, they rode the J.M. right side up, sitting, inside additional bracing, on their own landing gear.
The J.M., Uncle Sam, Stars, and Stripes were all armed with torpedo tubes and powerful laser cannon. We carried sensitive telescopes, radio gear, and detection devices of all sorts. There were dozens of internal and external inspection cameras all over the ship, wired into the command center video screens. Pressure suits, maneuvering units, a washer and drier, climbing ropes, a biological lab, workshop space, what seemed like an extra ship in spare parts, and a great deal more were tucked inside the hull here and there.
She was a good ship.
We sat there, admiring her, for a long time. For me, at least, that was the moment she stopped being a piece of metal for holding the vacuum out, and became my home. And now she was ready to fly.
Driscoll called us into her office for a brief set of final words before we launched. She was tired, very tired, and certainly more frightened than we were. She welcomed us to her office, sat us down, and politely offered us a drink, which we politely refused. She didn't seem to know where to begin for a long time. She hemmed and hawed about little things, the details of what would come next, all the time toying with the pencils and papers on her desk.
Finally, she plunged in. "Damn it. Do you kids know how much I love you?" she asked. "I hope not. They told me at command school that you're not supposed to know. Of course, they also told me that I'm not supposed to love you, either. I'm so proud of you. You've truly taken on the world, the galaxy. And you're going to go out there and break your back trying to wrestle with the unknown. You might die out there, struggling and fighting with the cold and the heat and the vacuum and the loneliness, and yet die well, with your spirit and your heart intact, without fully knowing what it is you are dying for. You can't possibly know. You're too young, too brave, too sure."
She paused, and sighed deeply. She threw back her head and stared at the ceiling for a time before she continued.
"The best clue to what it is all about that I can give you is this: only if you do die with your spirit and your heart intact will you have died well-and dying well simply means that you have lived well. But I don't truly believe you will die-you are both survivors. If there comes a time when you feel you can't go on, remember that; you are survivors, and use that fact to find the tiny shred of endurance, of courage, of strength you forgot you still had." She paused, and smiled, and we saw that her eyes were shining. "And that's all I have left to tell you." She led us to the door, embraced us both for a moment, and then we took out leave.
A few hours later we were at our command chairs, and a powerful tug was thundering along behind us, providing us the velocity we'd need for our first jump without having to touch the fuel in the J.M. tanks. This freed up our fuel for later use and thereby increased our range.
Faster-than-light drive moves a ship at the square of the speed of light. It's usually referred to as C2, pronounced "cee-squared." C2 gets you from the solar system to Proxima Centuri in about 105 seconds. That is, it would if anyone had any reason to go to Proxima Centuri. Of course, one has to use the C2 drive well outside the gravity well of a solar system, or end up far, far, far away from the intended destination.
There are other catches, as well. The jump between "normal" space and C2 takes a big jolt of power. If, God forbid, anything went wrong with your power supply and you got stuck in C2, well, the edge of the universe is over that way, and no one knows exactly what happens once you get there. Certainly, ships have been lost that way. Less catastrophic, but still very dangerous, is inaccurate astrogation. An error of .09 seconds in coming out of C2 would put you roughly as far from your target as Saturn is from the Sun.
Navigation computers are good enough these days that pilots can feel safe with about a half-billion-kilometer miss-factor. The J.M. would shoot for about three times that, as we were headed into territory not as well charted as that on the regular space lines. Also, if we came out over the pole of the target star, as we hoped to do, we would have the best vantage point for us to look for planets.
Most star systems (including Earth's) have the plane of rotation of their planets in the same plane as the equator of the star in question. So, if you looked at, say, the Solar System from the plane of the Sun's equator, the planets, asteroids, and what have you would be moving in orbits that would be seen edge-on from where you stood. If you watched the Earth for a year-that is, one orbit-it would simply appear to move in a straight line from one side of the sun to the other, and then back again, moving once in front of the Sun's disk, and once behind it. From a point far enough away to observe the entire orbit, the change in size of the Earth's disk as it moves toward and away from you, inscribing a circle seen edge-on, would be difficult to measure accurately. Seen from the north or south polar regions, however, the orbits of the planets would be laid out before the observer face-on and so would be easy to observe. This in turn makes it easy to measure motions of planets and other bodies and put together reasonably accurate charts and ephemera of their orbits.
What all this boils down to is that it is best to come in over a star system and look down on it, rather than come in at the side and see it edge-on.
Fine. It has been found that planets usually rotate in the plane of a star's equator. So how do we determine where the equator is? One star seen from another is a featureless dot of light.