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

Well, she didn't exactly yell at me, either, but the effect was the same: what she did was barely speak to me at all. I was left without much to do besides trying to figure out what the drone was. And I still didn't get anywhere with that.
By the time we were within visual range of the drone, I was more than glad of the change of pace-to say nothing of going out of my mind with curiosity.
Stars didn't have all the fancy optical gadgets we had on board the J.M., but she carried a pretty fair long-range camera. As soon as there was the slightest hope of picking up the drone with it, I brought it to bear. And got one of the great shocks of my life. Drones are usually about the size of a torpedo-maybe five meters long, and most of that fuel tanks. This thing was the size of the Joslyn Marie. Most of it fuel tanks. The only cargo seemed to be in a blister on the apex of the drone. Huge arrows, painted on the hull, pointed to it.
"It must have five times the fuel capacity of the J.M.," Joslyn said, her voice betraying as much shock as I felt. Surprise had evaporated all her annoyance with me.
"If they burned all that fuel getting here, they must have tracked us through three star systems...."
"If not more. And at high acceleration, too. See all the structural bracing?"
"Yes. The aft end is pointed along the direction of flight, too. It must have burned its last fuel slowing to a velocity we could match. One thing on the bright side-if the drone has scavenger pumps, we could take the last of its fuel for Stars' tanks."
"Even if that monster's tanks are down to one percent, that'd be enough to top us off. Here's hoping, Mac, what could it be?"
"We'll know soon."
We approached the giant ship slowly. As we closed to within a hundred meters or so, Joslyn pointed to one side of the screen. "There! A fuel hose waiting for us. They did think to set up a scavenger."
"Good. Maybe we'll have some fuel when this is over. Whatever it is."
I switched on our fueling system and forgot about it. It was an automatic that was supposed to call to a fuel system at a commercial port and request fueling. The port's robots were supposed to come and tend to the ship without bothering the crew. The home office had been kind enough to arrange that kind of service out here.
We came in over the docking port and swung our topside around to meet it, so that the two ships came together nose to nose. I made the docking run on the first pass and activated the capture latches to hold us solidly to the other ship.
We got out of our crash couches and climbed over each other getting to the nose airlock door, both of us burning with curiosity. I cracked open a bleeder valve to match our ship's air pressure with the drone's cabin pressure. There was a brief wooshing of air, and I swallowed to make my eardrums pop. At a nod from me, Joslyn undogged Stars' hatch, and then opened the drone's hatchway, a meter or so beyond it.
The drone's hatch swung open, revealing the interior. Since the ships were docked nose to nose, we were looking straight down from the top of the drone's cabin. The only thing in it was a great black cylinder, exactly the size to fit through the airlock passage. It was pointed right for the hatchway joining the ships; all it needed was a good push from below to send it through the lock into Stars.
We kicked off from the hatchway and drifted into the drone's cabin, staring at the cylinder. It was big, and its base was heavily braced against acceleration.
Joslyn hung in midair, fascinated. "My God, it's like a totem pole ready for-"
But a giant, booming voice suddenly shouted out from a speaker by the overhead hatch. "THIS IS A WAR EMERGENCY SITUATION," it roared. "TRANSFER THE CYLINDER TO YOUR SHIP WITH ALL POSSIBLE SPEED. DO NOT DELAY FOR ANY REASON. THE MOMENT AUTOMATIC REFUELING IS COMPLETED, CAST OFF AND RETURN TO THE JOSLYN MARIE AT MAXIMUM SPEED. DELAY FOR NOTHING. YOU MAY EXAMINE THE CYLINDER EN ROUTE. HURRY. HURRY. THIS IS A WAR EMERGENCY SITUATION. THAT IS ALL."
I clapped my hands over my ears and heard the great voice that way. The moment it was over, Joslyn and I looked at each other in something close to shock, and instantly got to work on the cylinder. That wasn't the sort of voice you argued with.
There was a very simple, straightforward quick-release device holding the cylinder to its bracing, and a diagram painted on it in bright red paint, showing how to use it. I pulled at one lever, Joslyn at the other, and the cylinder popped off its moorings with a deep sprung. A spring-loaded pusher had been cocked underneath it, and gave it a gentle shove toward the overhead hatch, moving it at about half a meter a second. I kicked over to one side of the cabin, scrambled up a set of handholds, and beat the cylinder through the hatch by only a few seconds. I cleared the hatchway and got to one side. As the cylinder came through Stars' hatch, the forward end of the great black shape sprouted a set of legs, a tripod, that swung into place and locked, forming a solid support for the thing. The legs touched Stars' inner hull and I heard a thunk, thunk, thunk-electromagnets coming on to further brace our new cargo.
Joslyn came into Stars' forward cabin right behind the cylinder, squeezing past it as she sealed the hatches. The cylinder was a good eight meters long: it took up the entire height of the cabin, with just room to get around it to go out the nose hatch. Someone had done very careful planning-apparently down to figuring out which ship type we'd use.
Just as Joslyn dogged the inside hatch, a speaker hooked into the cylinder came on, cued by radio from the drone. It wasn't quite as loud, but that voice still had authority. "REFUELING IS COMPLETED. CAST OFF. GET UNDER WAY. GET UNDER WAY. THAT IS ALL."
But Joslyn was already at the command seat, working the joystick. She snapped Stars through a tight head-over-tail loop and gunned the engine, bathing the drone's cabin in fusion flame, vaporizing part of it. The robot ship was a derelict now, and she wasn't going to waste time being careful of it.
I held on as best I could through the loop, and made it to my own couch as she started the main engine and we set out home. I looked at the base of the cylinder that sat in the centerline of our lander.
What had we gotten ourselves into? War emergency situation?
What war?
Ours, as it turned out.
Joslyn got us under way as quickly as possible, and we did the post-maneuver checkouts in record time. Twenty minutes after casting off from the giant drone ship, we started to take a good look at the cylinder.
The first thing I realized was that it was not quite as awesome an object as I had first thought. Underneath an outer sheath, much of its bulk was padding and bracing against acceleration. We set to work taking it apart.
Inside the packing material were a few odd-looking pieces of equipment and a set of very standard magnetic recording disks, each marked with a large red numeral. Joslyn pulled the one marked "1" out of its jacket and set it into Stars' playback unit.
"Mac-I'm almost afraid to play this thing."
"It's to late to chicken out, Joz-run it."
She pressed the play button. The main screen came to life, first displaying the flag of the League of Planets, and then dissolving to Pete Gesseti's face. Pete? What was he doing in a communication from base? Why not Driscoll? I looked hard at his image on the screen. He was tired, his clothes looked slept in. For the first time in my life, I looked at Pete and thought of him as ... old. Something more than six months' time had aged him.
But it was his eyes that drew me. They spoke of anger, determination, and some odd hint of faith.
Pete began to speak. "Mac, Joslyn. Hello. They asked me to do this because you both know me. Maybe it'll sound a little better from me, though it can't sound very good.
"We-the League, all the members, everybody, are at war. Not with each other. With someone from outside. Human, descended from Earth, speaking English. A heavy military force has attacked . . . no, they haven't attacked. They've conquered the planet of New Finland.
"The Treaty of Planets requires that the members of the League come to the aid of New Finland. Period. No ifs, and, or buts. The other members of the League have an absolutely binding legal and moral duty to come to the assistance of our sworn allies. We have to help them. And we want to. We need to.
"Maybe this isn't official policy, but it's fact: if the League doesn't fulfill its commitment, it will fall apart. At best, it will become a useless debating club. No one could rely on it. It isn't healthy now. Worse since you've been gone. There are too many bad little signs-infighting, petty squabbles, minor, pointless defiances of the League. Ugly, mean, little things.
"The League has got to hold together, because we don't have anything else. If it goes down, it'll go down the way the League of Nations went down. Straight down into war.
"None of that is pretty, but you need to know how much is riding on this. How much is riding on you."
Pete, or rather the recording of Pete, paused and frowned. He sighed. "It's this way. The New Finns are settlers from a group of people who were leaned on a lot by a big, dangerous neighbor-the old Soviet Union. So they settled far out from everyone else, where no one would be near enough to bother them. They are right at the limits of the physical area of space humanity is known to have colonized.
"The only thing we knew for a while was that we had lost contact with the New Finns. Then a small message drone popped into normal space in the New Britannica system. In it was a message from a group of New Finns who lived on the planet's large artificial satellite, Vapaus.
"They reported that the invaders called themselves 'Guardians,' and that these Guardians were in the process of setting up an anti-ship missile system around the New Finnish system. The Guardians had developed a rather simple gadget which detected the very specific burst of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation a ship coming in from C2 gives off, and hooked it up to a missile with a C2 generator of its own.
"The effect is that if a ship appears inside the Guardian-held New Finnish system, it will be detected, and destroyed within seconds of being so detected.
"There are already a number of civilian ships missing that were due to call on New Finland. We assume the missile system got them.
"The one ray of hope from the New Finns' message was that the missile array was not completely deployed. At the cost of the lives of several of their men, they came up with the deployment schedule for the missiles.
"If a ship enters the N.F. system from a certain direction by a certain time-670,716 hours Stellar Time, or noon GMT on July 8, 2115, Earthside, it should be able to enter the N.F. system without being destroyed."
Pete swallowed hard."The only ship, the only people we've got with the slightest hope of getting there on time-well, the ship is the League of Planets Survey Ship 41, Joslyn Marie. Your ship is fast. New Finland happens to be out the way of your survey. You're it.
"You have got to go in there."
Pete suddenly looked, not worried or afraid, but embarrassed, "Okay, that's that part of it. What you've got to do once you're there is really crazy.