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

I had a good bit of waiting to do. I spent part of it chewing over the plan Joz and I had cooked up for my getting inside the hollowed-out asteroid world Vapaus.
I had read up on the place. Vapaus had started out in life as a rather routine lump of stone and rock floating through space on an orbit that brought it within easy range of New Finland. The Finns had dragged it into orbit of the planet and set to work making an orbiting industrial base and shipping port out of it.
The first step was to hollow it out, and trim the oblong lump of rock into a cylinder.
The New Finnish system had several gas giant planets in its outer reaches. The closest-in giant had a small ice moon far outside its gravity well. This moon was mined for ice, which was towed to the asteroid's orbit.
The interior of the asteroid was by then a cylindrical hollow, which the Finnish engineers proceeded to pack with ice. The mine shafts were sealed with pressure locks, and the asteroid was then set spinning.
Giant solar mirrors were brought into position around the asteroid, and tremendous amounts of light and heat were focused on it.
The stone melted like butter.
The heat-pulse hit the ice-filled interior. The ice boiled off into super-heated steam and inflated the asteroid the way a child's breath inflates a balloon.
The engineers having done their math properly, the pressure locks blew off at the right moment. Ninety percent of the water escaped to space, and then the pressure lock resealed. The rest of the water was retained to become the basis of Vapaus's artificial ecology.
When the molten rock cooled, the Finns had an inside-out world about six times the size of the asteroid they had started with. They had been the first to try the technique with a stony asteroid. (Others had "inflated" iron-nickel asteroids, but those satellites had annoying problems with magnetic eddy fields and electrical effects brought on by spinning up megatons of conductive material.)
The scrap rock was dragged down into a lower orbit and the solar mirrors melted it all down into one lump of slag, which never got any name other than "The Rock". The Rock made a good base for a lot of processes that relied on zero-gee, and was also a handy orbital mine.
Joslyn and I had worked out a plan that was based on the fact that Vapaus had been inflated. It was known that the rock had bubbled in places. It ought to be possible to find a bubble, dig in through it, and reach the interior.
I hoped so, anyway. Otherwise, I was dead. I sighed. Best not to worry about that little possibility. It was going to be true of just about everything I did for the foreseeable future.
When my helmet was opaqued, it could be used as a reading screen. I had carried a few tapes along, and now I put them to use, as I learned another ten new words in Finnish.
It didn't make the ride seem any shorter.
The 30 hours slid away in studying, sleeping, and worrying. Riding with the helmet opaqued was tough: besides the readouts and telltales inside my suit's collar, there was nothing to see. The blacked-out glass of the helmet was dark and featureless, inches from my face. I hung in the middle of space with only my suit between me and infinity, feeling claustrophobic. That made my worrying all the more effective. A dozen times I reached for the black-out control to lighten the helmet so I could see, and just barely talked myself out of it each time. The sun would have blinded me. Period. That was a convincing argument, even under the circumstances.
The torp was programmed to bring me about 100 kilometers off Vapaus and then fire its motor not quite enough to bring me into orbital velocity. My backpack unit would make up the difference, and the torp was to fall on into New Finland's atmosphere and burn up.
I was asleep when the burn came, dreaming about flying Stars through a coal-black cave, trying to get to Joslyn, though she fell farther and farther away. I came awake badly disoriented, having a lot of trouble sorting out the dream from the reality, until I remembered it was okay to kill the blackout control now. The planet of New Finland popped into existence in front of my face, and then slowly swung away and got behind me. Its job done, the guidance system had shut down, and the torp was tumbling without gyros.
I wanted to get away from the go-cart as soon as I could; I wasn't eager to share its ride down to the surface. The backpack unit, comprised of a maneuvering jet unit and life-support system, was stowed underneath the crash couch, along with other equipment I expected to need. I pulled the hose connections that had attached me to the life-support unit, as they were snaked through the crash couch, wrestled myself free of the couch's straps, and pulled my gear out from beneath it.
Working as fast as I could, I shoved clear of the torp, dragging the gear with me. I wriggled into the backpack unit and re-attached the hose connections, then swung down the control arms and got busy with the joystick. I found Vapaus's radio beacon, got a reading on it, waited a minute, and took another reading. The backpack's guidance system was about as sophisticated as a wet finger in the wind, but the two readings were enough to give me a general idea of which direction to fly. I hosed out some fuel and watched the go-cart drift away, headed for oblivion in the upper atmosphere. The go-cart slid away, and was lost to view in a few minutes. I caught sight of a tiny spot of light ahead, just barely too big to be a star. I flipped up the helmet binoculars: Vapaus, sure enough.
I used the helmet sextant to get a rough hack on my ground-track speed. The numbers seemed about what they should have been, and I could feel at least reasonably confident that I was in an orbit that was close to the right one.
Time to do some more waiting.
About an hour later, I could clearly see Vapaus growing slowly from a spot in a round, featureless dot as I caught up in a long stern chase. Another half-hour and I could see the dot of light grow into a shape, and then I could see its spin as the surface of the asteroid rolled its lumpy face around.
I cleaned up my trajectory a bit and got myself moving a little faster and a little more accurately toward the target.
Vapaus swelled rapidly.
I performed a trim burn that set me headed squarely for the aft end of the satellite. The forward end was supposed to be a maze of air locks, ship's bays, maintenance and construction facilities, and so on. Vapaus was a busy place. From an economic point of view, Vapaus, not New Finland, was the focal point of this solar system. Wary of polluting the planet, the Finns had put nearly all their heavy industry in space. All business was transacted at the forward end, however, So far no one found it worthwhile to develop the aft end. It was blank, empty.
That fact was my ticket in. I hoped.
The asteroid grew to dominate the sky, a titanic grey form, a giant potato shape in the sky. Maybe it was a small world, but any world is tremendous on a human scale.
Suddenly, I had arrived. I was no longer moving toward a dot in the sky; I was in the presence of a place, a world, mammoth.
I couldn't decide if I was awed, or scared. It didn't matter, really. It got to me, just the same.
Subtle bumps and starts of my jets lined me directly behind Vapaus, the cylindrical potato shape foreshortening as I moved more squarely over the aft end, until I was hanging in the sky, facing the exact center of a circular field of rough terrain, half-lit by the distant sun.
It rotated slowly, sedately, in the patch of sky ahead of me, and I hung there, drifting toward it, looking for a place to land.
I was looking for a good-sized bubble in the rock, a relic of the boiling rock Vapaus had been formed from. Some of the bubbles had burst, their places on the surface marked by scarring craters. Others had cooled rapidly enough to survive as bubbles, perfect dome shapes in the chaotic landscape.
I jetted a little closer, until the surface of the asteroid was only 30 or 40 meters ahead of me-or below me, depending on how you looked at it-then braked to a halt so I could look things over. It was one hell of a big rock, grey and brown, and the spin that had seemed sedate from a kilometer back was now frighteningly fast, the rock whizzing past at a dizzying speed.
I found I was a bit off center, drifting toward the planet side. Suddenly, I was in shadow. I was low enough for the sun to drop below the horizon as seen from my altitude. I was getting God-damned close!
I tried to stay calm. This was going to be a hairy ride. I looked over the piece of real estate rolling toward me. There! A bubble just over two meters across, nearly in my line of flight. I fired my jets and moved in toward the surface, at about a meter a second. Sweat sprung up on my brow, and I shook my head to clear my vision. The droplets flew off my face and dried instantly against the side of the helmet.
I was now only ten meters above the surface, watching it rush toward me. I was seconds from my landing. Now I had to try and match my lateral speed to the satellite's spin. I had to be moving at the same speed as the bit of rock I landed on. Too slow and I'd be bowled over, and probably thrown out into space. Too fast and I might fly past the asteroid altogether, and have to try again-this time badly short of fuel.
I clenched my teeth and went in, aiming to fly slightly toward the center of the rock. I fired the jets so as to match speed with the spin. The whirling rock seemed to slow, and slow more, and with my feet a bare five meters above the surface, I matched the spin, released the maneuvering controls, and pulled the spike shooter from my belt, rushing as fast I could. I was about to hit! I shot the rocket-powered spike into the rock below me. Even as it bit into the rock, my lateral velocity began to show up again. I swung up short against the line attached to the spike and landed neatly on my feet, balancing on my free hand.
The asteroid was spinning to create an artificial gravity by means of the centripetal effect. The farther out from the axis you got, the stronger that gee force would be. I wasn't very far, but I was far enough. I felt a very slight tug down, and as far as my inner ears was concerned, "down" wasn't through the surface of the world anymore-it was toward the horizon, toward the rim of the world.
Suddenly I knew in my gut that I wasn't on a slight rise in the middle of a flat plane, but hanging by a thin line from an overhanging cliff three kilometers high. A cliff that had at its top-and at its base-nothing. Nothing but empty, empty space. Just as I made the mistake of looking down, the sun swung around the horizon at manic speed. The photoreceptors on the helmet dimmed a bit as the sun hit. I watched, fascinated, as the darkened sun sped around that gloomy plane and swept under me. The raging inferno of the sun was directly beneath me....
My foot slipped.
In an instant, I was dangling off the sheer face of the cliff, held only by the one length of line clipped to my waist. I was going to fall! Into the sun! My hindbrain screamed and gibbered. I looked down again to see if the sun was really there, and saw the planet, New Finland, whip beneath my feet. Closer and bigger than the stars, it seemed to move even faster. Then it left my field of view, and the empty, empty stars were there. Worse, a thousand times worse than a fall into the quick death of the sun. A million year's worth of monkey ancestors yowled in my head. I was going to fall, and to fall now was to fall forever, forever into nothing, always to fall, fall....
I passed out, only for a few seconds, I think. When I came to, I took as long as I dared to calm my instincts. My throat hurt, as if I had been screaming. I tried to steady my shaking body. I breathed deeply, relaxed and tensed every set of muscles, I tried to sing a little song to myself. Above all, I did not, repeat DID NOT, look down or open my eyes.
All the fears that normally protect us from foolhardy gestures-fear of falling, fear of the dark, fear of the unexpected and the disorienting, the dangerous surprise, had conspired against me. If the rope had been in my hands, where I could have let go in fright, instead of clipped to my waist, those fears would have killed me.
It took long minutes to conquer that fear.
When the trembling ceased, I slowly and carefully opened one eye, making sure to look only straight ahead, struggling to convince my inner ear that it was all right, I was only hanging in front of a very ordinary cliff that was only a half meter away. Just like in training. I waited a bit, then opened the other eye just as carefully. Okay so far.
Slowly, gently, I swung my legs back and forth, working up a pendulum motion that got me in reach of the surface.
I grabbed for handholds and, clinging for dear life, very gingerly peered down to look for my rock bubble. I breathed a sigh of relief. My marksmanship had been good: I was almost directly above it, and only about 15 meters away.
The surface sloped away toward the crazy sideways horizon, and Vapaus's rapid rotation brought the sun around to hang directly beneath me again.
Everything considered-the shakes I still had, the sweat that lined the inside of my suit, the aches of being in that suit for almost two days now, the idea I got that the helmet glass just had to crack, sometime, probably soon- and you'll agree I wasn't climbing down that insane cliff under ideal, or even hopeful circumstances. The only advantage I had was that, in being rather near the axis of rotation, the artificial gravity produced by Vapaus's spin was low. I could not possibly have made that climb in normal gravity.