"Daniel Keys Moran - Lord November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

put him well inside the orbit of all Jupiter's satellites except Amalthea. His target was an observation buoy
he had dropped into Jupiter's atmosphere, with seven other buoys, a week past. This buoy was the only
one to successfully blast itself back up into space, and unless Janssen snagged it on this pass, the buoy
would drop helplessly back into Jupiter's lethal atmosphere, burning up on re-entry, losing its atmospheric
samples and whatever data had not made it through via telemetry.
He had to pick up the buoy on his first pass because his margin of delta-V was close to nonexistent.
His craft, a modified Chandler BlackSmith, had heavy radiation shielding to protect him from Jupiter's
deadly and incessant radiation storms. (That was only one of the dozens of ways that Jupiter duty was
different from the Earth-Luna runs of which Janssen, an ex-SpaceFarer, was a veteran. Bar the odd
sunstorm, cis-Lunar space is largely free of radiation hazards. Around Earth-Luna, shielding is more a
drawback than an asset. Most solar radiation passes straight through the human body without damaging
it. Moderate shielding is actually worse than none; cascading secondary radiation from light shielding is
worse for the human body than the primary solar radiation against which it is designed to protect.)
Because Peter Janssen's slipship was so heavily shielded, his delta-V was correspondingly reduced;
his slipship massed half again what Chandler Industries had intended.
He whistled tunelessly as he made final approach to the buoy. They were awaiting him eagerly back at
the settlement on Ganymede- -well, the research scientists were. Or rather, he corrected himself, the
research scientists were eagerly awaiting his return of their buoy.
Whatever. At least someone was looking forward to seeing him.
He was not a popular man, Peter Janssen. His own moodiness and irritability contributed to it, he
knew. While at St. Peter's CityState, he had missed Luna; and now that he was at Ganymede, he missed
the CityState. He brooded at times that his life in the last few years had been a series of increasingly poor
decisions, made increasingly at random. Most of those who knew him these days had never seen him
smile.
Those same people would have been surprised to see the change that had come over him now. A grin
played across his lips; his eyes drooped closed and he lay slackly in the webbed padding of the pilot's
enclosure.
He was the slip.
The ship cameras were his eyes, fed video to his inskin, and he drifted alone inside a glowing
cathedral of stars. For all he had learned to hate Jupiter, it had the loveliest sky in the System; Amalthea
and Ganymede and Europa hung behind him in the view from his rear holocams, gray and white and
reddish; in his fore holocams Jupiter covered most of the sky with swirling bands of scarlet orange. The
rockets lay silent now, but soon they would come alive, pressing Janssen back into his webbing with a
savagery a street racer a hundred years past would have appreciated.
For a brief while, submerged in the identity of his ship, Peter Janssen, one of only a dozen or so
people of his time who had managed to get himself exiled from the SpaceFarer's Collective, was as
content as he would ever be in his life.
Something beeped on his radar, almost exactly a hundred and eighty degrees away from the buoy that
should have been the only large object in close. A frown passed like a ghost across Janssen's features.
He danced commands into the inskin socketed at his temple, and the slip's rear holocams selected and
telescoped in on the item causing the commotion.
Shining and black and silver came out of nowhere. Janssen had a brief fragmented impression of a
spider web dropping on him from a great height--
Every instrument in the slipship, every powered system, died.
Terror clawed at Janssen, vast and mortal. The muscles in his stomach clenched painfully and he
thought he would be sick inside his ship. A Presence touched his awareness, shuffled through his
memories. The Presence withdrew, and for the merest instant Janssen was empty.
 A wordless concept imprinted itself upon Peter Janssen's mind. He was caught instantly in a vast joy,
in a certainty of rightness that he had never known before.
Then the aliens destroyed his ship.