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

raced eastward at a thousand kilometers per hour. Dawn on Saturn was always
spectacular, but never more so than on a battle morning. As the sun climbed the
sky, it quickly transformed the world from a black and silver 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 fiancй.
“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.
“Don’t wear yourself out,” Dane said. “The high command here is still hoping our
show of strength will cause the Alliance to back off. We know their fleet left
Cloudcroft three days ago, but we still have no evidence that they are coming