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

The "go-cart" was what was left of the torpedo we had started with. Joslyn and I had pulled down the entire nose section. I had been working on installing a crash-couch onto the front end of the torp's motor housing while Joslyn pulled the guidance system out of the nose section and hooked it back up to the decapitated torpedo. She left off the frills: it would pick up a downloaded trajectory from Stripes's guidance system and run with those numbers: that was it. The control panel was one button marked "ON."
The crash-couch looked more like a lawn chair, and folded up like one, but it was extremely strong. The J.M. carried about ten of them, in case she ever had to carry passengers.
The go-cart was the key to our grand plan for getting an agent (me) down to talk with the locals and arrange for the little matter of the transmission of 5,000 combat troops.
Along with Pete's message to us had come other recordings, full of such information as our side had.
Most importantly, the League had some information on the enemy. When the alert came in from the New Finns, every intelligence outfit in the League had gone to work, digging into old files, cross-checking, trying to figure out the Guardians. It didn't take long to find out who they were-or at least who they had started out being.
About 110 years ago, at the turn of the 21st century, a collection of fascist and right-wing groups in Britain and the United States combined their forces and called themselves the Atlantic Freedom Front, or just the Front- apparently deriving the name from something in 20th-century England called the National Front. They staged demonstrations and caused a riot or two, and during the slump at the beginning of the 21st century, began to get some attention. They were willing to sign up just about anybody-people like the Ku Klux Klan, The New John Birchers, the remnants of Afkrikaaners in Exile. They got to the point where they thought they were a lot bigger than they really were.
On March 15, 2015, they attempted to overthrow the British and American governments. Never, at any moment, was either government in the slightest danger- the Front did not number more than a few thousand members on either side of the Atlantic. What was supposed to be a brilliant double coup ended up as little more than a pair of bloody scuffles in Washington and London. Their street thugs were called Guardians of the Front, and they managed to kill a few police and soldiers, and a few innocent bystanders. Mostly, the Guardians just got themselves killed. The leaders, and such of the others as could be caught and convicted, were thrown in jail. That was the end of the story, or should have been.
Colonization laws were pretty loose back then-and I guess they still are. Pretty much anyone who could hire a ship and get the needed gear together was allowed to launch and go pick a planet.
The Guardians, or what was left of them, set out to do just that. Not secretly, either-the intelligence kit we got included reproductions of old ads calling for volunteers to start "a New Order in the Skies." They were ready to launch their ship-the Oswald Mosley-by June 2018.
To no one's great surprise, the Guardians tried to bust their leaders out of jail before leaving Earth. The authorities had been expecting an attempt, but not such a well-organized or well-executed one: the Guardians had been learning. Simultaneous raids on prisons in England and the United States got the chief hoods out and left a lot of good men dead.
Two hours after the raids, the Guardians and their head men were launching ballistic shuttle craft toward the Mosley, and an hour later, the Mosley boosted from orbit, soon entered C2, and was never heard from again. No one was sad to see them go.
The planet the Guardians had claimed to be headed for was searched some time later. No sign of past or present human habitation was found. The Mosley was listed as missing and presumed lost with all hands, and good riddance. Last of the Guardians.
Until New Finland. Unquestionably the same people. They called themselves Guardians. The insignia matched, and so did the brutality.
Against them, the League had provided us with only a sketch of a plan: get the receiver down to the planet's surface at the right place and switch it on at the right time.
The League did provide sets of maps, and diagrams of the New Finnish system, drawn up at the time the planet was settled. There didn't seem to be much current information.
There also were language-lab gadgets and a complete set of tapes and recordings on Finnish.
No program of hypnotic teaching, sleep teaching, audiovisual gimcrackery, or anything else is going to change the fact that learning languages is tough for some people, and I am one of them. I came very close to rebelling against sentences like "The cat is on the roof of my grey-haired maternal grandmother's house of flats." That once came out "Grandmother's mother is on the roof with the grey cat on her head."
But Joslyn is one of those people who pick up languages the way my dress uniform picks up lint. She would be. In any event, she was there to see me through it all and help me get great-grandma and the cat off the roof.
Joslyn tried to use my language problem to say she should be the one to contact the New Finns. But that was clearly impossible. The reports the League had passed along were very definite on the point that the Guardians were barely allowing the Finnish women out of the house. No women were allowed in positions of even minor authority. The only Guardians any Finns had seen were men, though there were rumors of a "comfort corps." Whoever went down there would have to play spy, pretend to be one thing or another at one time or another. That would be merely tough for a man, but it would be impossible for a woman. I had to go.
Alone. Up to that moment, alone had meant alone together for us. Now I might die, or Joslyn might, and the other would be truly alone, surrounded by nothing but people, or perhaps marooned in space.
That was the thing we worked hardest at not thinking about.
We came to the transition point and skittered through the skies for a long minute or so of C2 flight, the longest jump either of us had ever taken. C2 doesn't feel any different than normal space, since what the C2 generator does is drag a bubble of normal space, big enough to contain the ship, into C2 conditions. The only disconcerting thing was that the outside cameras didn't work. A camera looking at the ship showed it normally, but any lens or port pointed outward showed . . . nothing. At least that was the theory. It didn't look like nothing. Empty space, that's nothing. What you saw in C2 wasn't that. It had no color, no detail, no substance, no evidence of any energies human instruments could pick up. But it wasn't nothing. I feel sure of that, but I couldn't say why. How could eyes evolved to see light make anything of what theory said C2 required-light that, well, moved faster than light, so to speak.
That doesn't make any sense, which is another attribute of C2.
But then we popped back into normal space in the outer reaches of the New Finnish system. Working as fast as she could, it took Joslyn half an hour to check our position. That slice of time I spent watching every passive detector we had. If the New Finns were wrong, and they had gotten the anti-ship missiles deployed out this way, we were already dead. The missiles supposedly came in so fast there wasn't any point in trying the laser without radar, and we couldn't use radar without being spotted ourselves. Even so, I had the laser primed and ready to go.
But the hours passed, and we were still in one piece long past the time it would have taken a missile to find us if there were one looking. We were inside and, for the moment, safe.
Joslyn finally spotted enough of the system's planets to triangulate our position. We were on course: we were going to fall straight into the sun. We'd brake our fall and roll out into a safe orbit first, of course, but keeping the sun between us and New Finland was the most obvious way to avoid being spotted: a sun makes a pretty fair shield. The easiest maneuver to keep us hidden was a direct fall. By the time we had to fire our main engines, we'd be completely screened by the sun.
Joslyn intended to put us in a solar orbit exactly opposite New Finland's, moving at exactly the same velocity, so that we'd remain hidden by the sun, always 180 degrees away from the planet, but in the same orbit.
But we had about a week of falling into the sun before we needed to maneuver. That time was private. I won't speak of it, except to say that we were as happy as we could have been, with things the way they were.
At last, it was nearly time for Joslyn to drop the J.M. into the proper orbit. We had to get me ready to jump ship before that. I would ride one of the two smaller ballistic landers, Stripes, on in the J.M.'s current trajectory for a while yet. We wrestled the go-cart onto one of Stripes' exterior cargo clamps, swathed it in reflective material and heat-proofing, and stowed my gear aboard the auxiliary ship.
And there was no more time. I had to hurry. If I lost the race, 5,000 troopers would be trapped for all time inside a timeless bubble of rotated C2 space, with no receiver to find the bubble and pull them back. If C2 was un-nothingness, that was undeath. If I lost the race, this solar system had no hope, and others might follow it.
We said our last in-person goodbyes in Stripes' airlock. We were at war. The odds were that we would never see each other again.
We held each other tight and said things that wouldn't interest anyone else anyway, until another moment more would mean Joslyn missing her burn window and losing fuel we couldn't waste.
Hatches clanged shut, I slid into my command couch, took the controls, and jogged Stripes' thrusters. I aligned my little ship and edged away from the J.M. The bigger ship's engines jumped to life, and the fusion jet took my wife away from me.
I slipped a set of tiny plastic headphones on, and squeezed them tight against my ears, as if that would keep Jozzy a little closer. "Goodbye, kid," I said softly.
"Good hunting, Mac. But save a few of those bastards for me."
"Why bastards? What have they done to you so far?"
"Well, you're not here any more, are you?"
The great power of the J.M.'s engines created a strong plasma, a super-hot gas-cloud formed of fusion exhaust particles. It caused static in radio frequencies. As the big ship slowed and I fell onward, the plasma served to jam radio signals perfectly. We were cut off from one another.
The Joslyn Marie slowed her fall and eased into orbit behind me, to wait there in the loneliness of space for word from me. If I survived to send it.
I too had to perform a pair of rocket burns, the first one speeding my fall into the sun, the second shifting my path into a tight loop around the sun, a gravity-assist maneuver that would flash me across the diameter of New Finland's orbit in less than a month.
It was a tricky maneuver, and might even cook poor old Stripes a bit-and me with her if the cooling system gave me any problems-but I had to move as fast as possible. There was no hope of using C2 this close to a sun. I'd be more likely to end up in the center of the star than where I wanted to go. I had to stay in normal space for another reason: the Guardians were looking for ships entering from C2, and I'd be hard to miss.
Still, it was a long wait, and an unpleasant one, more so as I came near the star. I was only 40 million kilometers from New Finland's sun at closest approach. That violated the warranty on Stripes, but she kept me safe through it all. Good ship.
The worst of it all was the boringness of space travel. There is very little to do on a ship by yourself. Added to that was the tension of all the unknowns ahead of me; it was not a pleasant time. Mostly I studied my Finnish.
Finally, it was over. One hundred eighty degrees around the sun from the J.M., I arrived at the vicinity of New Finland, albeit travelling at a great relative speed. I couldn't use Stripes' engines to slow down: Joslyn and I didn't want the aux ship to get within two million klicks of the planet. Closer, and there was a chance someone might spot her. I had to abandon ship.
That was what the torp, the go-cart, was for. I was to jump ship, climb into the fold-out crash couch, and ride the torp's motor in. Stripes would continue on her present course for a long while yet, until she was far enough from New Finland to use her fusion engine without risk of detection. Then she would turn back toward the sun, going into a solar polar orbit that would keep her in line of sight of both New Finland and the Joslyn Marie for many months, if she was left undisturbed by the Guardians. While in line of sight, Stripes could serve as a relay station for laser messages between Joslyn and myself.
I had an interesting trip from there on. I collected all my gear and checked my suit over a half dozen times. I would be counting on it for a long while. Then I gave the guidance pod on the go-cart a download from Stripes' astrogation computer. Now the torp's computer would know where it was and where I wanted it to go.
Before I abandoned Stripes, I wrote Joslyn a brief note. Nothing meaningful. But if I got myself killed, as was very likely, and Joslyn recovered the aux ship, I wanted her to have something, some words, that had passed from my hand to hers.
And then I was out the hatch. It took some huffing and puffing to get my oversized, pressure-suited self, my maneuvering backpack, and my equipment bag onto the go-cart in such a way that it would be properly balanced in flight. When I had, I stretched a finger toward the cargo-clamp release button, and a rattling vibration told me I was free of the ship. I reached a little farther and shoved hard against the ship's hull. The go-cart and I drifted slowly away. I checked the chronometer in my suit's helmet-an hour until I had to push that single button marked "ON" and get this show on the road. Plenty of time for Stripes to get safely distant. I hadn't shoved with great precision: the go-cart was tumbling gently. It didn't matter. I spent the hour watching the gently receding Stripes drift around my field of view, to be replaced by a splendid view of New Finland and her single large natural moon, Kuu. I was too far away for any hope of spotting Vapaus, which was my eventual target. I was lucky in that the sun remained pretty much at my back as I tumbled.
And then it was time. I pushed the "ON" button, and the torp's gyros began to whir busily. I felt the vibration through my suit. The guidance pod spotted New Finland and set itself up to home in on the planet.
Without any warning, the engine lit up ten gees at my back and that go-cart moved! It was a short life but a merry one, and the torp engine died as suddenly as it had opened up. Without the burn, I would be following Stripes as she slowly drifted away from the planet. Now I was moving straight for New Finland, and at a pretty good clip. The torp began to rotate itself along its long axis for the retro-burn about 30 hours later. If the retro-burn didn't work, I was going to drop right into the atmosphere and burn up. I had enough confidence in the torp that I wasn't worried, but I had something else that annoyed me enough to avoid boredom: I was now pointed straight at the sun, almost forced to stare at it. I slapped my sunshield down and set it to OPAQUE. Otherwise I would have been blinded.