"Smith, E E Doc - D'alembert 09 - Omicron Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

As they waited for Tatiana to decipher the control boards, Jules went up to his sister and put a hand on her shoulder. "I've got to go back out in the copter again."
"Why?" Yvette asked, startled.
"I counted four batteries of heavy-duties spaced around the edge of the landing field. With all of them intact, we'll never be able to take off; the instant we do, they'll get us in a crossfire that'll blow us out of the sky. Someone has to put them out of commission. How many minigrenades do you have in your belt?"
"Two," Yvette said grimly.
"With my two, that should give us just enough." He took the grenades Yvette handed him and turned to find Fortier blocking his way.
"I'll go with you," the naval officer said.
"No," Jules's voice was firm. "This is a one-person mission, and as team leader I pick the person to do it. With the exception of Lady A, I'm the best pilot with the quickest reflexes, and you'll need her to operate the ship. I won't risk a second life needlessly. Either I can do the job by myself or the copter will be shot down whether there's one person in it or two. You stay here and back up Lady A."
He turned once more to Yvette. "If I don't come back, make sure the Head gets this," he said, handing her the miniature camera he'd used to photograph the enemy plans.
Their eyes locked on one another for the briefest of moments. Brother and sister had faced death so many times in the past that goodbyes had long since been said. They were aware that any parting might well be their last, and they knew the bond they had formed between them would survive the death of either. Still, there was always the wistful moment when the inevitable seemed a little closer than usual, and they paused to memorize each other's face one last time.
Then the moment passed and Jules was back to business. "I'll make a sweep of the perimeter and knock out as many of the batteries as I can. That should give you time to learn the controls well enough to get airborne. Don't wait around for me. If you master the controls before I'm back, take off without me. If I get stranded down here, I'll go back to one of the cities and join the freedom fighters until the situation is resolved. The war won't last forever; I'll be smooth in the meantime."
Yvette gave a brief nod. She didn't want him to go-she would rather have gone herself-but she understood the need for the mission. Jules would make sure their ship could take off and carry the vital information they'd acquired back to the Empire for analysis and evaluation. Yvette also knew her brother was a survivor; even if they had to abandon him here on Omicron, he'd find some way to turn the situation to advantage. In fact, knowing him, he'd probably rally the local forces into defeating the aliens and pushing them off the planet.
Then Jules was gone, and she heard the outer airlock sighing shut behind him. He was cut off, now, from all contact with them; they couldn't even see what progress he was making on his task of wiping out the enemy gun positions. They would have to trust to his abilities to do the job for them-otherwise, their escape from this world would be very short-lived.
Tatiana had started deciphering the words and numbers on the various control mechanisms. She was not a pilot herself, and could only give literal interpretations; Fortier and Lady A listened intently to every word, trying to extrapolate from what she said to what they knew had to be the case if the ship were to function.
Yvette was left without anything to do. She chafed at the uncomfortable metal slave collar as she studied the controls of some of the less important panels, trying to evaluate their purpose. If the alien creatures were logical and if form did indeed follow function, then she might be able to make some educated guesses of her own about how things worked. She wouldn't trust herself to fly the ship, but she might get some of the backup systems, like weapons or sensors, to operate.
After a few minutes of intense concentration and a couple of failures, she met with eventual success. Pressing a series of opaque plastic areas on one control board caused a visiscreen to light up, showing a scene outside one portion of the ship. Encouraged by her success, Yvette went around the room turning on all the visiscreens. Because this was a scoutship and seeing was one of its primary functions, she ended up with a complete panorama of the field around the ship-and, not incidentally, this enabled her to watch her brother's progress on his own mission.
On the north side of the ship, an area of flames showed where Jules must have been successful in his attempt to bomb the heavy-duty blasters installed there. With a bit of effort, she picked out the speck on the screen that must have been his copter, flying around to the east. Beams were shooting past him, both from the mounted weapons and from handheld blasters fired by alien soldiers, but Jules's superb reflexes-even on the sluggish controls of the copterbus-enabled him to dart through the beams with seemingly effortless abandon.
As Yvette watched, the copter made a short bombing dive at the gun emplacement on the east side of the landing field, then just as suddenly swooped up again. She couldn't see the grenade fall at this distance, but she easily saw the repercussions as a massive explosion flared on the screen. With each successive hit, the copter had less blaster fire to elude, increasing its chances of further success.
Lady A's voice broke into the stream of Yvette's thoughts. "We think we've got the important controls figured out. Strap yourself in."
Yvette's heart sank. Despite her brother's brave words, she didn't want to abandon him here if she could help it. "He's only knocked out two of the gun batteries so far," she pointed out. "We ought to wait and see if he can get them all. It would improve our chances of taking off."
Lady A hesitated just a fraction of a second. "We've got to wait a few minutes for the engines to charge up, anyway. We can give him that long." She was being uncharacteristically generous, but Yvette was willing to accept the favor.
On the screen, Jules's copter was flying steadily along on its mission, and Yvette's hopes rose that he'd complete it successfully and return before they took off. But then, in a single moment, those hopes were shattered. A bolt from one of the heavy-duty blasters at the southern side of the field struck the tail rotor of the copterbus, practically severing the entire back end.
The aircraft veered crazily out of control, and Yvette held her breath. Then, with one last suicidal plunge, the copter dove directly at the gun emplacement. There was an enormous explosion as the copter and the blaster that wounded it both went up in a single ball of bright orange flames.
Yvette sat quietly in her acceleration couch, hardly daring to breathe. The image stayed etched in her memory like a frame of film frozen on a screen. Part of her didn't want to believe what she'd all too convincingly seen. It was one thing for the mind to accept intellectually the death of a close relative, and quite another to live through the experience.
From the master control console, Lady A said calmly, "That's that. He knocked out three of the four batteries. We'll have to take our chances with the other one. Tatiana found the deflector shields, so it might not be too bad."
Her voice was so matter-of-fact that Yvette wanted to kill her more than she'd ever wanted to in the past. At the same time, Yvette's body felt so totally limp that she'd have been utterly incapable of following through on the impulse.
If Lady A noticed Yvette's mood, she paid it no heed, turning instead to the vital task of getting the ship into the air. The engines trembled beneath them as her fingers manipulated the alien controls with careful deliberation. Then, with a mighty surge that startled all of them, the scoutship lifted off the ground in a sudden leap for the open sky.
The one remaining blaster battery tried valiantly to shoot down the fugitive vessel. Searing beams of energy scored the sides of the ship, but the defensive shields held against the flux. In a matter of a few seconds the escaping vessel was beyond the range of the gun emplacement, soaring through the atmosphere and beyond, into the empty space surrounding the planet Omicron. Jules's final mission had been a success; he'd knocked out enough of the aliens' artillery to enable the ship to leave the planet.
But even though they were off the ground, they were still not out of danger. There were alien ships in orbit around Omicron, acting as sentries, and they began to converge on the tiny scoutship almost as soon as it cleared the atmosphere. The Empire team faced one final test of their abilities before they'd be allowed a safe escape.
Fortier and Tatiana were hastily conferring over one instrument panel, trying to figure out how the weapons system worked while Lady A grimly set about working the unfamiliar controls to steer an evasive course until they were far enough from Omicron's gravity to slip into subspace. Yvette bestirred herself to leave her seat and join Fortier and Tatiana. She couldn't help Lady A pilot the vessel and she couldn't go backwards in time to save her brother's life, but she could at least have some part in making sure the mission succeeded and Jules's death was not in vain.
As it turned out, the scoutship's weapon system was completely automated, with all aiming and firing done by computer systems. Once they figured out how to turn the systems on, the ship's computer did the rest of the job, at least as accurately as most live gunners would have been able to do. If she'd been completely familiar with the controls, Yvette might have had a slight edge-but as it was, an automated system was by far the best choice.
Slowly but surely Lady A was getting the feel of the controls. As the sentry ships closed in on the escaping vessel, she was able to start evasive actions, dodging randomly by way of the attitude controls and steering a safe course between the rays of enemy fire. The one thing that remained constant was maximum outward acceleration. They had to get away from Omicron as quickly as possible, before the enemy could mount a full-scale pursuit. The aliens had worked too hard to keep the Empire as ignorant of their existence as they could; they would not want any information leaking out before they were ready.
Realizing the importance of stopping the fugitives, a couple of the sentry ships did not bother shooting. Instead, they put all their effort into making a suicidal charge at the escaping ship with the full intention of either pulling up close enough to fire point-blank or else colliding with the scoutship and destroying it that way. The astrogational computer at the front console displayed the orbital tracks of the suicide ships as they converged toward the fugitives. The screen also displayed the locus of points far enough from Omicron to make a safe jump into subspace. The two courses intersected almost perfectly; it would be a very close escape, if they managed it.
Lady A made no attempt to avoid the confrontation with the oncoming ships. She was gambling that either her own vessel would reach the subspace point first, or else the automatic gunners would inflict severe enough damage on the approaching craft that they would be no threat. In any event, she dared not slow up lest the other pursuing sentry ships start gaining on them.
The lines on the computer screen drew closer and closer together with each passing second as suspense mounted within the cabin. Fortier, Yvette and Tatiana could do nothing but watch the screens and hope. Their fate was out of their hands; everything rested on the ability of Lady A, the alien pilots, and on the inexorable laws of physics.
As the suicide ships came within range, the scoutship's guns opened fire on these new targets. For a while, nothing happened. Then one of the beams scored a victory. The first of the suicide ships took a direct hit along the flank, and began careening through space out of control, no longer a threat. Undeterred, the second ship kept on coming, its path set to intersect theirs within a matter of seconds.
Yvette looked to the visiscreens, which were still turned on. At first all she could see was the darkness of space, a sprinkling of stars, and the rapidly receding image of Omicron behind them. Then, in an instant, the chase ship appeared. Because of the great relative speeds involved, it seemed to come out of nowhere heading directly at them. There was barely time for Yvette to draw an intake of breath and brace for the inevitable collision.
And then they were in subspace, and the entire picture changed. Gone were the pursuing ships and their energy beams trying to catch the scoutship in a deadly crossfire. Gone was the small craft that had tried to ram them and had come so close to succeeding. Instead, the computer screen showed a clear region around them; the local area of subspace was devoid of any ships but their own.
The situation would not stay that way for long; the aliens knew that keeping their secrecy was too important to their cause to let the scoutship get away. More and more of the pursuing vessels also dropped into the strange void of subspace the instant they were far enough from Omicron's mass to do so safely. Space battles were impossible in subspace; the laws of physics did not permit one ship to touch or contact another, although they could track and see where each was. But the aliens were not about to give up the chase. Their hope was to track the Empire team's ship until it re-emerged in normal space, at which point they would try to encircle and destroy it before the spies on board could get their information back to Earth.
For the next hour and a half, Lady A sat in front of the alien control board playing a desperate game of cat-and-mouse. At random intervals she would drop out of subspace, thereby vanishing from the aliens' detectors, hoping they would overshoot before they, too, could return to normal space and look for her ship. Then she would return to subspace and hope to speed away before they could react again.
These were standard tactics for a ship fleeing a superior force, and the aliens were prepared for it. They were not, however, prepared for the speed at which Lady A could react. Her mechanical nervous system had far faster reflexes than those of biological creatures, and in the end that factor proved decisive. More and more of the enemy ships dropped out of the chase as they were unable to keep track of the constant changes, until finally the scoutship found itself alone in subspace with no barriers between itself and an effortless journey back to the Empire.
Lady A turned back toward the others. Her perfect features were marred by neither tension nor sweat. She did not even wear the look of relief the others felt. "Barring any unforeseen catastrophes, our mission is successfully completed," she said calmly. "You may congratulate yourselves on a job well done. We escaped with only thirty-three and a third percent casualties, which is actually far better than I anticipated. I expected fifty percent at least."
Once again Yvette had to squelch the silent rage welling up inside her at the cavalier treatment of Jules's death. Their mission may indeed have accomplished its goals, but losing her beloved brother made it something less than a triumph.
CHAPTER 12
Plans and Alliances
The scoutship returned to Luna Base, where the members of the team became the center of the most frantic activity in the history of mankind.
Fortier, Yvette and Lady A were all thoroughly interrogated and debriefed by hordes of military experts, prying for every tiny bit of information they might possess. No detail was too insignificant, because it was impossible to say what trivial-seeming clue might offer major insight into the nature of the enemy and his plans.
The scoutship and the weapons Yvette had grabbed from a dead alien were taken to a special hangar along with her metal slave collar, and their components were analyzed. Did the aliens have any technological secrets the Empire could use? Did their ships and their weapons work on the same principles? Did they have the same range and accuracy? If a war was going to be fought, as seemed inevitable, these were questions that had to be answered. The tapes made could be measured in kilometers.
Tatiana, meanwhile, was taken aside and grilled separately. She lectured a roomful of top Empire cryptographers and linguists on everything she'd learned about the aliens' written language and the few spoken words she'd heard blared from loudspeakers at the headquarters or shouted by the attacking soldiers. They questioned her endlessly on seemingly arcane points of grammar and she answered as best she could based on the context in which she'd seen the various symbols used.
It was the documents, though, that were the real success of the mission. Even while Tatiana was teaching the scholars the basics of the alien tongue, other experts were analyzing the captured writings to seek out any important information about the enemy's military capabilities and plans. As the contents of two desks had been photographed in toto, there was a lot of trivial information to be sorted through-but even this was not wasted, for it helped the linguists build their knowledge of the alien vocabulary and grammar. Words that were obscure in important documents became clear when examined in everyday contexts.
The informational content of the major documents, though, was so important it made the entire effort worthwhile. It included not only star maps of the aliens' home territory, but inventories of their major fleet and equipment, plus tentative plans for the invasion of the Empire of Earth. The espionage team could scarcely have found more vital data if they'd known precisely where to look.