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

"Bell Labs, on the mining satellite Lucifer. They came up with something about the time the Joslyn Marie was launched.
"A matter transmitter."
"Oh, boy," I said. A matter transmitter?
"They say-well, they say it works on the same principle as the C2 generator, except with the force, or the field, or the power, or something, rotated through 90 degrees. I'm a paper pusher; I don't understand it. Now this next is the nutty part."
He paused. "They have a lot of faith in it. In the same package where you found this recording, is the receiver, or at least the core of it, for the matter transmitter. You're supposed to get to the planet's surface with it, assemble the receiver on a precisely predetermined spot- and they'll transmit 5,000 troops to you from a light-month away."
"Good Lord!" Joslyn cried, drowning out Pete for a moment.
"... means they'll have to transmit the troops, or the signal carrying the troops, a standard month-30 Earth days, 720 hours-before you receive it. Which boils down to mean the troops will be transmitted to you before you could possibly build the device to receive them."
"Joslyn," I said, "this is insane. How could it work?"
"Mac, I don't. ..." Joslyn trailed off to listen to Pete.
"There are more recordings that give you the technical grounding for all this. Some other gadgetry. Learning sets for the Finnish language." Pete's image fumbled with some papers.
"Mac, Joslyn. I dunno. It seems crazy from this end- but not as crazy as it must seem to you. We are very frightened. These Guardians simply took New Finland. Maybe they could just take us. The message from the Finns say that's the way they're talking. We have to stop them. The guys in the lab came up with the transmitter, and the brass came up with this plan. We're going to put it all in the fastest drone ever made-actually the fastest ship ever made. We're going to try and find you in three different star systems. The drone will launch and cruise at accelerations that would kill a man in minutes.
"There isn't any way for you to send a message saying 'Yes, we got the drone's signal and the cargo and we'll do it.' There isn't enough time. So they'll send the troops no matter what, just hoping you've picked up the ball.
"In other words, if you do it, 5,000 men are taking a tremendous risk. If you don't, and the signal isn't received, they're dead.
"It is all on you. You are the only chance those troops have to live, and maybe the only chance the Finns have to regain their liberty." He paused and lowered his voice. "And I have a very strong, gut feeling that this has something to do with what I said after the third drink at the funeral."
My stomach did a flip-flop. The Guardians? They hijacked the Venera?
"I have no logical reason, no evidence. But I have a very strong hunch I'm right. If I am, and it is true, our friends won't be on New Finland. They, and others caught the same way, will be back in the Guardians' system, forced to fill in for those who went to war on New Finland. I warned the people who asked me to do this I'd have some cryptic ways of convincing you." There was a bare, brief hint of a smile on his face for a moment. "Listen, you two. There's a very old poem, from long ago and far away. It's the last way I have to ask you to do this thing, to fight this war for us. Part of it said:

" 'Take up our quarrel with the foe.
To you, from failing hands we throw
The torch, be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith we those who die,
We shall not sleep. . ..'

"The torch be yours," Pete repeated. His voice came close to cracking. I was as close as he had to a son, and he was called upon to send me out to war-to die, perhaps. No, the odds were too bad. To die, probably.
"Gesseti out."
And we were on our own.

CHAPTER THREE

The spanner nearly jumped out of my hands again, but this time I kept it under control at the cost of a set of rescraped knuckles.
"Damn!" I yelled, sucking at the reopened cuts. "This is not my idea of a good time."
We were working on one of the torpedoes in the airlock and workshop deck of the J.M. Two things made it tougher. The first was that most of the handtools aboard the J.M. were intended for use in zero-gee. This meant a tool had to exert equal pressure in two perfectly opposite directions. Otherwise, work would have been impossible. A normal hammer is a good example of why special tools are needed. Hit something with a hammer in a reasonable gravity field and you'll stay in place, pasted down by your own weight. Do the same thing in zero-gee and you'll go flying. Without gravity to hold you, the force of your swing not only will drive a nail down, but you up: an equal and opposite reaction.
So zero-gee tools have counteraction balance weights, counter-rotating collars driven by gears, and so on. The power tools especially look like the results of drunken binges at an inventors' convention.
The second flaw was that the J.M. was boosting at two gees toward the calculated transition point for the jump to the New Finnish system. A zero-gee spanner is more a weapon for use against one's self than a tool in two gees.
There was a third flaw, of course, We were boosting toward the New Finnish system-and neither of us wanted to go.
"Mac, easy with that thing! You've got it tight now, don't strip the bolt."
"Sorry."
"Let's take a break. We're ahead of schedule anyway."
"Sounds good." I tossed the spanner aside and it clattered to the deck with a satisfactorily loud noise. Without further discussion, I followed Joz down to the wardroom for a cup of tea. She puttered about with the makings while I sat and brooded.
"I cannot believe this," I suddenly announced.
"What?" Joslyn asked, her mind more on the tea than me.
"The mission. The whole harebrained thing. And the way we got into it."
"The way we got into it. You're right. That's the worst part of it," Joslyn said as she brought the kettle to the table and sat down. There were advantages to constant boost: you had homey things like kettles instead of squeeze bulbs. "If I had a chance to do it," she continued as she poured, "I honestly believe I would have volunteered to help the good people of New Finland. I truly do. But I feel so compelled by the way it happened, as if I were a piece on a chessboard that had no choice but to go where it was sent."
"I don't think Pete liked doing it that way, but I don't see what choices he had, either. No one did, since the Finns were attacked. Once that happened we were the only thing the League had. Good old Pete," I said ruefully.
"He certainly pushed every one of your buttons, from the debt you feel to him as your substitute father, to duty...."
"... To the chance that we might get a lead on our missing classmates." That was the first time I had called those lost on the Venera "missing," not "dead." I realized I was convinced they were alive.
"Don't forget the fate of the League is in our hands," Joslyn said, with just a hint of a smile.
"I haven't, but I'll keep trying." I sipped at my tea and we sat quietly for a minute. "What gets me is there's nothing to stop us from saying the hell with it and pointing the J.M. away from the trouble. If we turned and ran, or just destroyed the drone and showed up a year or two from now and claimed we had never found it-if we chickened out, no one could do anything about it.
"Against that, the only thing making us go in and risk our lives for strangers is the feeling that we have to do it." I paused. "And it's enough, I guess. Thanks to the sense of duty they've bred and beaten into us. And I know what you mean about having no choice."
"And now that it's all out of your system, let's go finish the go-cart," Joslyn said, rumpling my hair.