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

The standard technique is to use the Doppler effect. Light of a given frequency has a higher apparent frequency when it is moving toward you, and a lower apparent frequency when it is moving away from you. The light doesn't change, the way you perceive it does. Obviously, one side of a rotating object will be moving toward you and the other side will be moving away. The difference is measurable over stellar distances. Very careful measurements can usually yield the plane of rotation, and thus the equator and poles, within about ten degrees or so.
Ten degrees is a lot. Stack on top of that the fact that the actual distance to a target star is rarely known to any degree of accuracy, and you'll see that there is a certain degree of luck in Survey work. Get bad data, use it to put your ship in the wrong plane, and you'll have to waste fuel getting the ship to where it was supposed to be. Waste too much fuel and you come back early, or not at all. It is possible to "mine" hydrogen fuel from an ice moon, but finding suitable ice is rare, and the process is a long and tedious one.
You come out of C2 with precisely the heading and velocity you start out with. The stars orbit the center of the galaxy, just as planets move about a star. Thus, they move relative to each other. A typical velocity difference would be on the order of about 70 kilometers a second. A ship travelling from one star to the other would have to match that velocity shift.
The tug was boosting us up to our required velocity, so that we could match speeds with the star we were shooting for first. Once there, we would make any adjustments needed to our speed and heading, and begin the search for planets.
We cast off from the tug and were on our way. Five minutes later the J.M.'s computers decided we're in the right place at the right time and booted us into C2, and we were off into untravelled regions.
For 4,000 hours or so, say six months, the J.M. did her job. We visited a half dozen star systems, each magnificently different from the others, each a sore temptation to stay and explore and wonder at for a lifetime, at least. The only thing that kept us from staying was the promise of fresh wonders in another part of the sky.
Not only a universe of wonders, but the woman I loved to share them with me. Those were the days of my greatest happiness. Each day I woke to challenging, satisfying work that was not only fun but useful, vital. Each day was spent with someone I not only loved, but liked. Each day was a new adventure.
Each day, every day, was fun.
Imagine yourself standing on a tiny worldlet of tremendous mineral wealth left there by some quirk of the way worlds are born. Imagine staring up at the sky at a world ten times the size of Jupiter, knowing that the violent storms you see in its roiling sea of clouds are the birthpangs of a star, its thermonuclear furnaces just flickering into life. Joslyn and I stood in such a place, and knew others would follow, rushing to extract the treasure beneath our feet before the fireball came to full life and expanded out into space, leaving nothing but cinders where we stood. The end for that world will come in a human lifetime, or perhaps twice that.
Imagine two worlds the size of Earth's moon that revolve around each other, separated from each other by less than 3,000 kilometers. Tidal forces have spawned endless earthquakes and utterly shattered the surfaces of the twin worlds. We named them Romulus and Remus. One day they will smash into each other and leave only rocks careering through the void.
Imagine a world where the air is fresh and sweet, and life very like that on Earth fills the seas and skies and land. There I found-something. I say it is a piece of worked metal. Joslyn thinks it is a chance piece of nature's work, a glob of alloy spat out of a volcano and shaped by the caprice of water and weather. Humanity will settle there soon, and I hope some child born there will dig one place, dig another, and one day prove that ours are not the only minds to have touched that place.
Joslyn and I lived to wander the sky and do as we pleased. It was the happiest time of our life together.
And then they found us.
We were in the vicinity of our sixth target when they did. We had been there for about ten days. We were just about finished with the location-and-orbit survey search for major planets, and were ready to start down from our perch far above the star's north pole to take a close-up look at some of the better real estate we had spotted.
We were in bed, asleep, when the alarm sounded. It was the general-alert buzzer, which meant the emergency was rare enough that it didn't rate its own alarm code.
Joslyn and I scrambled out of bed, bounced off a few bulkheads, and made our way to the command deck. I fumbled a hand to a switch and killed the alert buzzer.
Joslyn, who usually wakes up faster than I do, got the computer to decode the alert before I was even in my flight chair. "It's a courier drone!" she said.
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Yeah, but it doesn't make any sense." Courier drones were expensive, and the odds of one finding us all the way out here were remote, at best.
"Tell the drone that. Get on your board and pull a printout of the drone ops manual, will you?" Joslyn was studying her screen, trying to squeeze more information out of the words on it.
I typed in a few commands and a book-length manual buzzed its way into the line printer's hopper. I instructed the computer to convert the courier's beacon signal into something we could use.
"So when is it going to transmit its message to us?" Joslyn asked.
I looked at my screen and whistled. "Never. Don't ask me why, but there's a security block on all the information aboard except the beacon."
"Can we get it to home in on us?" Joslyn was thinking like a pilot-if the drone did the maneuvering, that would save on our fuel.
"The decode of the beacon signal shows tanks nearly dry."
"Oh, wacko. It can't get to us?"
"Not unless you want our grandkids to pick it up. That 'nearly' dry is close to being 'completely'."
"They shouldn't be, with a direct boost from base."
"I'll bet you who fixes dinner it isn't a direct boost. I think it tried our last survey system first, then headed here."
"Mac! Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to program a drone to do that? The search gear it would need? The instruments? The power? It would have to be huge."
"I know, I know, I know. That's why this is a manned ship we're flying. But we left the last system a week ahead of schedule. We're still supposed to be there. And the heading that thing's on is almost exactly the heading we used to come from there--and about 120 degrees away from where it would be on a direct boost from Columbia."
"Bloody. You're right. The velocity is all wrong for Columbia, too."
I stared at the screen full of numbers. "Get some rendezvous data. Give us a set of three trajectories- reasonable economy, mid-range, and minimum time. I'll make coffee."
"We'll need it," Joslyn said, and started plotting courses.
Fifteen minutes later she had some rough figures to show me. "One percent of our fuel gets us there in a month. Five percent gets us there in five and a half days." She paused.
"And what's the minimum trajectory?"
She bit her lip. "Thirty-six hours. Fifteen percent of our remaining fuel."
"Is that assuming we fly the Joslyn Marie?"
"Oh, goodness no! All of these are assuming we fly Stars. She seems to fly a trifle more efficiently than Stripes."
"Fifteen percent . . . damn. Okay, feed the minimum time course to Stars' computer. I'll start a systems check on her." I started for the airlock level.
"Mac!" Joslyn called. "We-we can't lose that much fuel! We do that and we might as well pack up the rest of the mission!"
I sighed. "Joz-I know you're the pilot. You're in charge of flying the ship without wasting fuel and keeping our options open. Driscoll put me in command, so I have to be in charge of choosing which options we take. Now, whyever base sent that drone after us, they judged it more important than our mission, or else they wouldn't have sent it."
"But what could they have to say that would be important enough to send a drone after the ship?"
"I don't know. But if it's so important that it was worth tracking us across two star systems, it's certainly urgent. The party's over, Joz. The real world just caught up." I went below to start on powering up the lander.
What could be important enough? I simply couldn't think of a single possibility. I did a rough guess in my head on what the drone would cost, juggling the figures as I worked. The answer was impressive. For a robot ship smart enough to scan one system, search it, and then reject it, plus the computers to hack a course to another system, plus the engines, the fusion plant, the C2 plant, the communications gear-probably more than the Joslyn Marie, since it would be a custom job, not mass-produced like the J.M.
Getting the J.M. for this job was a miracle. What was big enough to spend that kind of money?
Three hours later we cast off from the Joslyn Marie, leaving her powered down to wait for our return. Stars was a trim little ship, and Joslyn even let me do the flying, for once. I lined us up with the gyros to save fuel on the attitude jets, just to keep on Joslyn's good side.
The course was a hair-raising one. We had to blip into C2 for a few milliseconds, pop out and change our heading, then into C2 again. All this to avoid falling into the local sun, which was dangerously close to what would be a direct course to the drone. Then a long cruise while we gunned out fusion engine in earnest and lined up for the final jump to the drone's position and velocity.
It was a dull 36 hours, besides the few minutes required now and again to monitor the ship and guide the computer through the course. It was not made any more pleasant by the fact that Joslyn was mad at me. While she understood the need to get to the drone fast, she didn't have to like it, and she couldn't yell at the base personnel who had sent it out after us.