"Michael McCollum - The Clouds of Saturn" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

etching to a blue-white panorama of air and cloud. Lars watched as the rays of the sun chased azure
shadows from the deep cloud canyons, and turned The Arch overhead into a pale ghost of its former self.

“Message coming in fromDelphi .”

Sands glanced toward his copilot. Halley Trevanon was a brunette in her early twenties (Standard
Calendar). Halley possessed a wide mouth, full lips, green eyes, and a scar that bisected her left
eyebrow. She was scanning the sensor readouts that told them what ships were in their vicinity.

“Patch him through,” Lars said.

The communications screen on the instrument panel lit to show Dane Sands’s smiling face. Dane was
Lars’s younger brother, and Halley’s fiancé.

“Hello,SparrowHawk ,” Dane said. “Get enough sleep last night?”

“You know damned well we didn’t!” Lars muttered back. Dane was serving aboard the New
Philadelphia flagship,Delphi , some two hundred kilometers to their west. It was his task to act as liaison
betweenSparrowHawk and her New Philadelphia employers. Like them, he had been at his post since
just after Second Midnight when the first sighting reports had come in.

Five thousand kilometers to the east, a New Philadelphia scout had reported an unknown aircraft moving
west at high speed. Although there had been no positive identification, the commodore commanding the
New Philadelphia fleet had ordered his heavier-than-hydrogen craft launched. In the three hours since,
SparrowHawk and the other ships of the fleet had been on guard for an approaching enemy. Despite
their efforts, they had detected nothing.

“I’ve got some news for you,” Dane answered. “It looks like last night was a false alarm.Dakota may
have suffered a sensor glitch caused by atmospheric conditions.”

Lars nodded. Saturn’s thick atmosphere of closely packed hydrogen atoms did strange things to radar
performance. Eddy currents and vertical convection cells created ghosts that looked like the wake of a
fast moving aircraft. Such mistakes were common.

“What are our orders?”

Dane glanced at something out of camera range. “I show you two hundred kilometers east ofDelphi .”

“Correct.”
“Why don’t you work your way back in this direction? If nothing has shown up by the time you arrive,
we will take you back aboard. You should be here in time for breakfast.”

“Understood,” Lars said. “We’re turning now.”

He pulled his control to the left and back slightly, sendingSparrowHawk into a gentle turn. As he did so,
Dane Sands asked, “How’s my girl?”

“Excited, and a little scared,” Halley responded. Like Lars, she was encased in an environment suit, with
her helmet visor up. Should the ship be holed, she could seal her suit in a matter of seconds. The other
four crewmen aboardSparrowHawk were similarly attired.