"Steve Perry - Aliens 01 - Earth Hive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Now what did they think he’d done?
 2
There was a lot of trash orbiting Earth.
In the hundred years since the first satellites had lifted, careless astronauts or construction
crews had lost bolts, tools, and other chunks of hardware. The small stuff, some of it whipping
around at fifteen klicks a second relative, could punch a nasty hole in anything less dense than
full-sheath armor, and that included people inside a ship coming or going. Even a chip of paint could
dig a crater when it hit. While this was a danger to ships, most of the little stuff burned up on reentry;
what didn’t was collected by special robot rigs everybody called dust mops.
For a time there was a real risk that the big stuff would get to the ground—part of a
construction ship flamed down and killed a hundred thousand people on the Big Island once, and
also made Kona coffee exceedingly rare. Because of that and similar incidents, somebody finally
realized there was a problem with all the orbiting junk. Laws were passed, and now anything bigger
than a man got tagged and swept. And rather than create a new agency, the work was passed on to
an organization that already existed.
This was why the Coast Guard cutter Dutton hung in high orbit over North Africa, starlight
glistening on its armored boron-carbon hull, its crew of two yawning as they moved in to tag a
derelict ship. Garbage Control’s flight computer said this heap was about to start its fall, and before
that happened, the thing had to be probed, checked for anybody who might be camping on it, then
blasted into pieces small enough for the dust mops to collect. SOP.
“Probe ready to launch,” Ensign Lyle said.
Next to him, the cutter’s captain, Commander Barton, nodded. “Stand by and. .. launch
probe.”
Lyle touched the control. “Probe away. Telemetry is green. Visuals on, sensors on,
one-second burn.”
The tiny robot ship rocketed toward the battered freight hauler, feeding electronic information
to the cutter behind it.
“Maybe this one is full of platinum ingots,” Lyle said.
“Yeah, right. And maybe it’s raining on the moon.”
“What’s the matter, Bar? You don’t want to be rich?”
“Sure. And I want to spend ten years in the CG pen fighting off the yard monsters, too. Unless
you figured out a way to shut down the blue box?”
Lyle laughed. The blue box recorded everything that went on in the cutter, plus all the probe
input. Even if the ship was full of platinum, there was no way to hide it from Command. And military
officers didn’t get salvage rights. “Well, not exactly,” Lyle said. “But if we had a few million credits,
we could hire somebody who might.”
“Yeah, your mother,” Barton said.
Lyle glanced at the computer flat screen. It was cheap hardware; the Navy had full
holographies but the Guard still had to make do with the bottom-of-the-line Sumatran Guild
electronics. The probe’s retros flamed as it reached the hulk. “Here we are. Is that good flying, or
what?”
Barton grunted. “Look at the hatch. It’s bulged outward.”
“Explosion, you think?” Lyle said.
“Dunno. Let’s open this can up.”
Lyle tapped at his keyboard. The probe extruded a universal hatch key and inserted it into the
lock.
“No luck. Lock’s shot,” Lyle said.
“I’m not blind, I can see that. Pop it.”
“Hope the inner hatch is closed.”
“Come on, this piece of crap has been up here for at least sixty years. Anybody on it would be