"John DeChancie - Skyway 2 - Red Limit Freeway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dechancie John)

Skyway Book 2
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Red Limit Freeway

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John DeChancie
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?1

There they were, up ahead-the Trees at the Edge of the Sky. That's what Winnie called them. Other
people called them different things: Kerr-Tipier objects, tollbooths, noncatastrophic singularities, portal
arrays...
I called them cylinders. That's what they were, big ones, some as high as five kilometers. They were lined
up on both sides of the roadway like impossibly huge fenceposts, their color impossibly black, blacker
than the interstellar space they bent and twisted and warped to their creators' ends, and to our benefit.
Everything about them was incredible. They were said to be spinning at unimaginable speeds, though their
featureless surfaces gave no perceivable confirmation of this. A few experiments had been done on them,
measuring Doppler shifts of infalling particles and Hawking radiation flying out. But the Colonial Authority
had a long-standing ban on the publication of data and even theoretical studies concerning the portals.
One only had rumors to go by. And the rumors were: The results were impossible.
Their rotational speeds worked out to be faster than light. It couldn't be, but that's what the numbers said.
"What's our speed, Sam?"
"Oh, we're moseying along nicely. If you'd care to move your eyeballs a few millimeters to the right,
you'd see for yourself."
"You know I can't read instruments and drive at the same time."
"Good Lord, and I was just about to offer you some chewing gum."
"Oh, cut the merte, Sam."
"Is that any way to speak to your father?" Then Sam guffawed, in that scratchy/liquid synthesized voice of
his-if the oxymoron can be forgiven, it's the only way I can express what the sound is like. In no way
does it resemble my deceased father's voice, except in emotional tone and inflection. I didn't have a
recording of Sam to pattern the waveforms after when I ordered the voice-output software for the rig's
computer.
Sam went on, "We're right in the groove. Forget the numbers, I've got her on speed lock."
I glanced at the digital telltales, the array of numbers suspended in the air at eye level and at about thirty
degrees to either side of my line-of-sight straight ahead. Positioned so as to hide in the retinal blind spot,
they were unobtrusive until looked at directly. I usually had them turned off; if you moved your head a lot
they seemed like pesky fireflies flitting about. "Okay, fine. Everybody strapped in?"
Roland Yee was in the shotgun seat. "Check," he said.
"I think we're all secure back here," John Sukuma-Tayler reported.
I chanced a look back. John, Susan D'Archangelo, and Darla Petrovsky nA-e Vance were in harnesses
in the back seats. The cab accommodated five comfortably. I heard squabbling in the aft-cabin-a little
living space useful for long hauls.
"Hey, Carl!" I yelled. "Is Lori strapped down back there?"
"Like trying to hog-tie a-give me your damn arm!-like trying to wrassle a she-cat!"
"Lori!" I shouted. "Be a good girl!"
"I'm okay, for God's sake. Let me-"
"Gotcha!"
"I'm okay, I'm telling you!"
"Look, you had a concussion," Carl told her. "Now, behave, or we wrap you in confetti and ship you