"Baxter, Stephen - Manifold 03 - Origin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

It was a chance to regain control.

He didn't take it.

Then the moment was gone, and he was committed.

He felt exuberant, almost exhilarated, like the feeling when the solid boosters
cut in during a Shuttle launch, like he was on a roller-coaster ride he couldn't
get off.

But the plane plummeted on towards the sky wheel, rolling, creaking. The
transient mood passed, and fear clamped down on his guts once more.

He bent his head, found the ejection handle, pulled it. The plane shuddered as
Emma's canopy was blown away, then gave another kick as her seat hurled her
clear.

And now his own canopy disappeared. The wind slammed at him, Earth and sky
wheeling around, and all of it was suddenly, horribly real.

He felt a punch in the back. He was hurled upwards like a toy and sent tumbling
in the bright air, just like one of the strange iron-filing people, shocked by
the sudden silence.

Pain bit savagely at his right arm. He saw that his flight-suit sleeve and a
great swathe of skin had been sheared away, leaving bloody flesh. Must have
snagged it on the rim of the cockpit on the way out.

Something was flopping in the air before him. It was his seat. He still had hold
of the ejection handle, connected to the seat by a cable.

He knew he had to let go of the handle, or else it might foul his 'chute. Yet he
couldn't. The seat was an island in this huge sky; without it he would be alone.
It made no sense, but there it was.

At last, apparently without his volition, his hand loosened. The handle was
jerked out of his grip, painfully hard.

Something huge grabbed his back, knocking all the air out of him again. Then he
was dangling. He looked up and saw his 'chute open reassuringly above him, a
distant roof of fully blossomed orange and white silk.

But the thin air buffeted him, and he was swaying alarmingly, a human pendulum,
and at the bottom of each swing G forces hauled on his entrails. He was having
trouble breathing; his chest laboured. He pulled a green toggle to release his
emergency oxygen.

The artefact hung above him, receding as he fell.

He had been flung west of it, he saw now, and it was closing up to a perfect