"Tom Kratman - A Desert Called Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kratman Tom)

need are nuclear weapons. Give me a dozen such and I will break the FSC."
"That, I am afraid," Robinson answered, "will never happen. Our weapons are identifiable as ours.
And, while we could – and did – use them on the FSC in past days, those days are long past."
"Then help me in other ways."

Interlude
21 January, 2037, 51.716 AUs out from Sol
The trickiest part had been the sail. It had to resist tearing, or be self repairing, or be otherwise
repairable, while also avoiding becoming overly charged, electrically. It had also to be very lightweight
and highly reflective; the amount of propulsion provided by photons from the Sun and other sources
striking the sail being very low except in the aggregate.
In the end, and after frightful expenditures, it was decided that self repairing was too hard. The
nanites which did effect repairs on the sail were not, strictly speaking, a part of it. They worked though,
even in the vacuum of space and even while under bombardment by the sun's unfiltered rays. The sail
was quite porous, the diameter of the pores being less than the wavelength of the light which forced the
sails forward.
The mechanism for setting the sail was simplicity itself. Instead of a complex mechanical operation
to raise and lower it, a series of gastight tubes were sewn around the exterior and connected to the main
ship by much thinner tubes. Gas was pumped into the tubes to set the sail, pumped out while thin
filaments were retracted to furl it. Heating elements within the tubes kept the gas from freezing and
collapsing in the cold of deep space.
Other problems, microminiaturized electronics and an extremely lightweight spacecraft body, had
been easier. Indeed, they had been almost natural outflows of ongoing, purely terrestrially oriented,
research. It was a short step from nanotube body armor for soldiers to a nanotube spacecraft body, for
example. The programming had been even easier if not precisely simpler.
Not to say that the ship was cheap. It had eaten up almost all of the United States' National
Aeronautics and Space Administration's somewhat constrained budget for the better part of two
decades. The less said about the scandals, the overruns, the bribes from various foreign subcontractors,
however, the better.
The ship, if one could call a robot a ship, was named the Cristobal Colon. Many had held out for a
different, generally more culturally sensitive and less eurocentric, name. These ranged from Saint Brendan
and Leif Eriksson (obvious nonstarters) to Sinbad to Cheng Ho. Since the Americans were footing the
bill, however, they got to choose. Moreover, they were, at the time, going through one of their periodic
bouts of extreme nationalism. "Cristobal Colon" seemed good to them and the rest of the world could
lump it.
The robot, or ship, was just under two meters in diameter and approximately nine long. Various
projections – a radio telescope here, an antenna there – were attached to the outside. The computer
which controlled it was deep inside, or as deep inside as one can get with a cylinder two meters across.
The sail dwarfed the robot ship though the sail massed very little and the ship several tons.
The ship was very fast, as men reckoned such things. Boosted by lasers fixed to the moon and
floating in space, by the time the ship reached the point it was at it was going a very appreciable fraction
of c. Everything was operating normally, though there was a bit of trouble in the Number Thirty-three
vent. There were nearly a hundred such, however, which allowed Mission Control or the robot to steer
the thing a bit. Even with one such operating at sub-optimal efficiency, there was no danger.
Imagine the consternation at Mission Control, then, when the robot and sail seemed to wink out of
existence completely . . .

Chapter Two
I loved you
And so I took the tides of men into my hands