"Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

• EXOSPHERE

“All right, babe. The first elevator heading down will be crammed with cargo, but Glenn Spivey put in a word, so I should be able to hitch a ride on the next one. I may even be in Central before you.” Teresa shook her head, amazed. “Spivey arranged it? Are we talking about the same Colonel Spivey?” Her husband’s face beamed from the telecom screen. “Maybe you don’t know Glenn as I do. Underneath that beryllium exterior, there’s a heart of pure—”

“ — of pure titanium. Yeah, I know that one.” Teresa laughed, glad to share even a weak, tension-melting joke.

So far, so good, she thought. Right now it felt great just looking at him, knowing he was a mere forty kilometers away, and soon would be much closer. Jason, too, sounded eager to give this a try.

Someone had once told Teresa it was too bad about her husband’s smile, which sometimes transformed his intelligent features into those of an awkward puppy dog. But Teresa found his grin endearing. Jason might be insensitive at times — even a jerk — but she was sure he never lied to her. Some faces just weren’t built to carry off a lie.

“By the way, I watched you snag that hook, first pass. Did you take over from the computer again? No machine pilots that smoothly.”

Teresa knew she was blushing. “It looked like the program was stuttering so I…”

“Thought so! Now I’ll have to brag insufferably at mess. It’ll be your fault if I lose all my friends up here.”

The capture maneuver was actually simpler than it looked. Pleiades now hung suspended below the space station, from a cable stretched taut by gravitational tides. When it was time to go, they’d simply release the hook and the shuttle would resume its original ellipse, returning to mother Earth having saved many tons of precious fuel.

“Well, I reckon it’s cause I’m paht Texan,” she drawled, though she was the first in all her lineage ever to see the Lone Star State. “Ergo mah facility with the lasso.”

“It also explains why her eyes are brown,” Mark Randall inserted from nearby.

Jason’s image glanced toward Teresa’s copilot. “I don’t dare comment on that, so I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it.” Then, back to Teresa, “See you soon, Rip. I’ll reserve a room for us at the Hilton.”

“I’ll settle for a broom closet,” she answered, and hang it if Randall took the wrong meaning. Some people just couldn’t imagine that a husband and wife, meeting for the first time in months, might want above all else to make contact, to talk quietly and preserve something neither of them wanted to lose.

“I’ll see what I can arrange. Stempell out.”

After securing the hook, their first task had been to offload tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Likewise the extra orbital maneuvering propellants Teresa’s careful piloting had saved. Every kilo of raw material in orbit was valuable, and the station offloading crew went through the procedures with meticulous care.

The holo display showed Pleiades suspended, nose upward, just below the bottom portion of the station — Nearpoint — the section closest to Earth. It was a maze of pipes and industrial gear hanging by slender, silvery threads many miles into the planet’s gravity well. Teresa watched nervously as three station operators in spacesuits finished draining the aft tanks. Only when the hoses were detached at last did she release a knot of tension. Explosive, corrosive liquids, flowing only meters from her heat shielding, always made her edgy.

“Crew chief requests permission to commence cargo offloading,” Mark told Teresa.

“Granted.”

From the maze above, a giant, articulated manipulator arm approached Pleiades’ cargo bay. A spacesuited figure waved from the bay, guiding the arm gingerly toward the mysterious Air Force package.

Colonel Glenn Spivey observed from the window overlooking the bay. “Easy does it. Come on, you bastards, it’s not made of rubber! If you ding it—”

Fortunately, the crew outside couldn’t hear his backseat driving. And Teresa didn’t mind. After all, he was charged with equipment worth several hundred million dollars. Some anxious muttering at this point was understandable.

So why do I detest the man so much? she wondered.

For months Spivey had been working closely with her husband on some unspoken project. Perhaps it was her dislike of being excluded, or that nasty word “secrecy.” Or perhaps the resentment came simply from seeing the colonel take up so much of Jason’s attention, at a time when she was already jealous of others.

“Others”… meaning that June Morgan woman, of course. Teresa allowed herself a brief remise of resentment. Just don’t let it cause an argument, she reminded herself. Not this time. Not up here.

She turned away from Spivey and scanned the status boards again — attitude, tether strain, gravity gradient — all appeared nominal.

In addition to the hook-snatch docking trick, tethered complexes like this one offered many other advantages over old-style “Tinkertoy” space stations. Long, metalized tethers could draw power directly from the Earth’s magnetic field, or let you torque against those fields to maneuver without fuel. Also, by yet another quirk of Kepler’s laws, both tips of the bola-like structure experienced faint artificial gravity — about a hundredth of a g — helpful for living quarters and handling liquids.

Teresa appreciated anything that helped make space work. Still, she used remote instruments to examine the braided cables. Superstrong in tension, they were vulnerable to being worn away by microscopic space debris, even meteoroids. Statistical reassurances were less calming than simply checking for herself, so she scanned until she was sure the fibers weren’t on the verge of unraveling.

Overhearing Spivey, clucking like a nervous hen as his cargo cleared the bay, Teresa smiled. I guess maybe we’re not that different in some ways.

The Russians and Chinese had similar facilities in orbit, as did Nihon and the Euros. But the other dozen or so space-capable nations had abandoned their military outposts as costs rose and the skies came increasingly under civil control. Rumor had it Spivey’s folk were trying to cram in as much clandestine work as possible before “secrecy” became as outmoded up here as below.

The crane operator loaded the Colonel’s cargo into an old shuttle tank — now the station freight elevator — and sent it climbing toward the weight-free complex, twenty klicks above.

“Request permission to prepare the airlock for transit, Captain.” Spivey was already halfway down the companion-way to middeck, impatient to join his mysterious machine.

“Mark will help just as soon as the tunnel is pressurized, Colonel.”

One spacesuited astronaut examined the transparent transitway connecting Pleiades’ airlock to Nearpoint. He waved through the rear window, signing “all secure.”

“I’ll see to Spivey,” Mark said, and started to unstrap.

“Fine.” But Teresa found herself watching the spaceman outside. He had remained in the bay after finishing, and she was curious why.

Climbing atop one of the tanks at the aft end, the station crewman secured his line to the uppermost insulated sphere… then went completely motionless, arms half outstretched before him in the limp, relaxed posture known as the “spacer’s crouch.”

Teresa quashed her momentary concern. Of course. I get it.

A little ahead of schedule for once, the fellow was seizing a chance that came all too rarely. He was watching the Earth roll by.

The planet filled half the sky, stretching toward distant, hazy horizons. Directly below paraded a vastly bright panorama that never repeated itself, highlighted topographies that were ever-familiar and yet always startling. At the moment, their orbital track was approaching Spain from the west. Teresa knew because, as always, she had checked their location and heading only moments before. Sure enough, soon the nubby Rock of Gibraltar hove into view.

Great pressure waves strained against the Pillars of Hercules, as they had ever since that day, tens of thousands of years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean had broken through the neck of land connecting Europe and Africa, pouring into the grassy basin that was to become the Mediterranean. Eventually, a new balance had been struck between sea and ocean, but ever since then it had remained an equilibrium of tension.

Where the great waterfall once surged, now diurnal tides interacted in complex patterns of cancelation and reinforcement, focused and reflected by the funnel between Iberia and Morocco. From on high, standing waves seemed to thread the waters for hundreds of kilometers, yet those watery peaks and troughs were actually quite shallow and had been discovered only after cameras took to space.

To Teresa, the patterns proved beautifully, once again, nature’s love affair with mathematics. And not only the sea displayed wave motion. She also liked looking down on towering stratocumulus and wind-shredded cirrus clouds. From space the atmosphere seemed so thin — too slender a film to rely all their lives upon. And yet, from here one also sensed that layer’s great power.

Others knew it too. Teresa’s sharp eyes picked out sparkling glints which were aircraft — jets and the more common, whalelike zeppelins. Forewarned by weather reports on the Net, they were turning to escape a storm brewing west of Lisbon.

Mark Randall called from the middeck tunnel. “The impatient so-and-so’s already got the inner door open! I better take over before he causes a union grievance.”

“You do that,” she answered quietly. Mark could handle the passengers. She agreed with the cargo handler, out in the bay. For a rare instant no duties clamored. Teresa let herself share the epiphanic moment, feeling her breath, her heartbeat, and the turning of the world.

My God, it’s beautiful…

So it was that she was watching directly, not through Pleiades’ myriad instrumentalities, when the color of the sea changed — subtly, swiftly. Pulsations throbbed those very storm clouds as she blinked in amazement.

Then the Earth seemed suddenly to bow out at her. It was a queer sensation. Teresa felt no acceleration. Yet somehow she knew they were moving, rapidly and non-inertially, in defiance of natural law.

It did occur to her this might be some form of spacesickness — or maybe she was having a stroke. But neither consideration slowed the reflex that sent her hand stabbing down upon the emergency alarm. With the same fluid motion, Teresa seized her space helmet. In that time-stretched second, as she spun around to take command of her ship again, Teresa caught one indelible glimpse of the crewman in the cargo bay, who had turned, mouth open in a startled, silent cry of warning.

Back in training, other candidates used to complain about the emergency drills, which seemed designed to wear down, even break the hothouse types who had made it that far. Whenever trainees felt they had procedures down pat, or that they knew the drill for any contingency, some smartaleck in a white coat inevitably thought up ways to make the next practice run even nastier. The chief of simulations hired engineers with sadistic imaginations.

But Teresa never cursed the tiger teams, not even when they threw their worst at her. She used to see the drills as a never-ending exercise in skill. Perhaps that was why she didn’t quail or flinch now, as a storm of noise assailed her.

The master alarm barely preceded the first peal from the shuttle’s backup gyroscope. As she was shutting that down, the characteristic buzzer of the number one hydraulics line started chattering. Station Control wasn’t far behind.

“Gotcha Pleiades, we’re onto it… It looks like… no…”

Voices shouted in the background. Meanwhile, Pleiades’ accelerometers began singing their unique, groaning melody.

Teresa protested — We can’t be accelerating! But her inner sense said differently. Logic would have her shut off the sensors — which were obviously giving false readings. Instead she switched on the shuttle’s main recorder.

Amber lights blazed. She acted quickly to close a critical OMS pressurization line. Then, as if she didn’t already have enough troubles, Teresa’s peripheral vision started blurring! She could still see down a tunnel. But the zone narrowed even as she shouted — “No. Dumpit, no!”

Colors rippled across the cabin, turning the cockpit’s planned intricacy into a schizophrenic’s fingerpainting. Teresa shook her head sharply, hoping to drive out the new affliction. “Control, Pleiades. Am experiencing—”

“Terry!” A shout from behind her. “I’m coming. Hold on…”

“Pleiades, Control. We’re… having trouble—”

A shrill squeal interrupted over the open link from Erehwon_; it made her wince in dread recognition.

“Mark, check the boom!” Teresa cried over her shoulder as she peered through a narrowing isthmus at the computer panel by her right knee. The thing was so obsolete it couldn’t even take voice commands reliably. So more by rote than sight she flipped a toggle over to manual override.

“Pleiades, we’re going blind—”

“Same here!” she snapped. “I’ve got acceleration too, just like you. Tell me something I don’t know!”

The voice fought through gathering static. “We’re also getting anomalous increase in tether tension…”

Teresa felt a chill. “Mark! I said check the boom!”

“I’m trying!” He shouted from the ceiling port. “It… looks fine, Terry. The boom’s okay—”

“… extremely high anomalous electric currents in the tether…”

Two amber blurs switched over to red. “Put your helmet on and get ready to jettison the transitway,” Teresa told her copilot as more alarms whistled melodies she had never before heard outside a simulator. Teresa felt rather than saw Mark slip into his seat as she pushed aside a switch guard and punched the red button beneath. Instantly they heard a distant crump as explosive charges tore away the plastic tunnel recently attached to their airlock.

“Transitway jettisoned,” Mark confirmed. “Terry, what the hell’s going—”

“Get ready to blow the boom itself,” she told him. By touch, Teresa punched buttons on the digital autopilot, engaging the shuttle’s smaller reaction-control motors. “DAP on manual. RCS engaged. When we break off, we’ll hang for a minute before dropping. But I think—”

Teresa paused suddenly as one of the red smudges turned amber. ” — I think—”

Another switched from crimson to yellow-gold. And another. Then an amber light went green.

As quickly as it had arrived, the frightening rainbow began melting away! She blinked twice, three times. Starting in the middle, the visual blurriness evaporated. Acuity returned as warning lights and musical alarms subsided one by one.

“Pleiades…” Station Control sounded breathless.

Buzzers were shutting down over there, as well. “Pleiades, we seem to be retiming—”

“Same here,” she interrupted. “But what about the tether tension!”

“Pleiades, tether tension… is slackening.” Control’s tone was relieved. “Must have been transient, whatever the hell it was. There may be some backlash though…”

Mark and Teresa looked at each other. She felt stretched, pummeled, abused. Was it really over? As more amber lights winked out, they inventoried damage. Miraculously, Pleiades seemed unharmed.

Except, of course, for the million-dollar transit tube she’d just jettisoned. The passengers weren’t going to appreciate being ferried like so many beachballs, in personal survival enclosures. But their resentment couldn’t match that of the bean-counters in Washington, if no justification were at hand.

“Jeez. What if we’d gone ahead and blown the boom?” Mark muttered. “Better put that squib on safety, Terry.” He nodded toward the primed trigger, flashing dangerously between their seats.

“Hold on a sec.” Teresa’s eyes roved the cockpit, seeking… anything. Any clue to the mysterious episode. She tapped her throat mike. “Control, Pleiades. Confirm your estimate that backlash will be minimal. We don’t want to face—”

That was when her gaze lighted on the inertial guidance display, showing where in space their ring laser gyroscope thought they were. She read it like a newspaper headline. The numbers were bizarre and rapidly changing in ways Teresa didn’t like at all!

Eye flicks took in the corresponding readouts of the star tracker and satellite navigation systems. They were in total conflict, and none of them agreed with what the seat of her pants was telling her.

“Control! I’m disengaging, under emergency protocols.”

“Wait Pleiades’. There’s no need. You may increase our backlash!”

“I’ll take that chance. Meanwhile, better check your own inertial units. Have you got a gravitometer?”

“Affirmative. But what… ?”

“Check it! Pleiades out.”

Then, to Mark, “You blow the boom, I’ll handle the DAP. Jettison on count of three. One!”

Randall had his hands on the panel, still he remonstrated. “You sure? We’ll catch hell…”

“Two!” She gripped the control stick.

“Terry—”

Intuition tickled. She felt it — whatever it was — returning with a vengeance.

“Blow it, Mark!”

Before she even felt the vibration of the charges, Teresa activated her vernier jets in translational mode, doing as any good pilot would in a crisis — guiding her ship away from anything more substantial than a thought or a cloud.

“What the hell is going on up here? Have you both lost your minds?”

A sharp voice from behind them. Without turning she snapped, “Colonel Spivey, strap in and shut up!”

Her harried, professional tone worked better than any curse or threat. Spivey might be obnoxious, but he was no fool. She sensed his quick departure and swept him from her mind as reaction jets wrestled the orbiter’s reluctant mass slowly away from the station’s tangle of cranes and storage tanks. On the back of Teresa’s neck all the tiny hairs shivered.

“Pleiades, you’re right. The phenomenon is periodic. Anomalous tension is returning. Gravitometer’s gone crazy… tides of unprecedented—”

A second voice interrupted, cutting off the controller. “Pleiades, this is Station Commander Perez. Prepare to receive emergency telemetry.”

“Affirmative.” Teresa swallowed, knowing what this meant. She felt Mark lean past her to make sure the ship’s datasuck boxes were operating at top speed. In that mode they recorded every nuance for one purpose only, so endangered spacers could obey rule number one of their trade…

Let the next guy know what killed you.

The station commander was dumping his operational status into Pleiades in real time — a dire measure for the chief of a secret military station. That made Teresa all the more anxious to get away fast.

She ignored navigational aids, checking orientation by instinct and estimate. Teresa groaned on realizing that two main thrusters were aimed at Nearpoint’s cryo tanks, risking a titanic explosion if she fired them. That left only tiny verniers to nudge the heavy shuttle. She switched to a roll maneuver, cursing the slowness of the turn.

“Oh, shit! Mark, is that guy still in the cargo bay?”

The creepy nausea was returning, she could tell as she fought the sluggish spacecraft. Nearby, Mark laughed suddenly and a bit shrilly. “He’s still there. Helmet pressed to the window. Guy’s mad, Terry.”

“Stop calling me Terry!” she snapped, turning to get a fix on Nearpoint again. If the tanks were clear now…

Teresa stared. They weren’t there anymore!

Nothing was there. Tanks, habitats, cranes… everything was gone!

Alarms resumed their blared warnings. With her instruments turning amber and red again, Teresa decided Erehwon was none of her business now. She punched buttons labeled x-translational and high, then squeezed the stick to trigger a full-throated hypergolic roar, sending Pleiades where she figured the station and tether weren’t.

Mark called out pressures and flow rates. Teresa counted seconds as the blurriness encroached again. “Move, you dumpit bitch. Move!” She cursed the massive, awkward orbiter.

“I found the station.” Mark announced. “Jesus. Look at that.”

Through a narrowing tunnel Teresa glanced at the radar screen. She gasped. The bottom assembly was more than five kilometers below them and receding fast. The tether had stretched suddenly, like a child’s rubber toy. “Damn!” she heard Mark Randall cry. Then Teresa had difficulty hearing or seeing anything at all.

This time the squidgy feeling went from her eyes straight back through her central sinus. The blaring of new alarms mixed with strange noises originating within her own skull. One alert crooned the dour song of a cooling system gone berserk. Unable to see which portion, Teresa flicked switches by touch, disabling all the exchange loops. She had Mark close down the fuel cells as well. If the situation didn’t improve before they ran out of battery juice, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

“All three APUs are inoperable!” Mark shouted through a roar of crazy noise.

“Forget ’em. Leave ’em turned off.”

“All of them?”

“I said all! The bug’s in the hydraulic lines, not the APUs. All long fluid lines are affected.”

“How do we close the cargo bay doors without hydraulics?” he protested through rising static that nearly drowned his words. “We won’t… able to… during reentry!”

“Leave that to me,” she shouted back. “Close all lines except rear hypergolics, and pray they hold!”

Teresa thought she heard his acknowledgment, and a clicking that might have been those switches being closed. Or it could have been just another weird sensory distortion.

Without hydraulics they couldn’t gimbal the main maneuvering rockets. She’d have to make do with RCS jets, flying blind in a chiarascuro of distortion and shadow. By touch Teresa disengaged the autopilot completely. She fired the small jets in matched pairs, relying on vibration alone to verify a response. It was true seat-of-the-pants flying, with no way to confirm she was moving Pleiades farther from that dangerously overstretched tether, or perhaps right toward it…

Sound became smell. Roiling images scratched her skin. Amid cacophonous static Teresa thought she actually heard Jason, calling her name. But the voice blew away in the noisome gale before she could tell whether it was real or phantom — one of countless chimeras clamoring from all sides.

For all she knew, she was permanently blind. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the battle to save her ship.

Vision finally did clear, at last, with the same astonishing speed as it had been lost. A narrow tunnel snapped into focus, expanding rapidly till only the periphery sparkled with those eerie shades. Screaming alarms began shutting down.

The transition left her stunned, staring unbelievingly at the once-familiar cabin. The chronometer said less than ten minutes had passed. It felt like hours.

“Um,” she commented with a dry throat. Once again, Pleiades had the nerve to start acting as if nothing had happened. Red lights turned amber,- amber became green. Teresa herself wasn’t about to recover so quickly, for sure.

Mark sneezed with terrific force. “Where — where’s Erehwon? Where’s the tether?” A few minutes thrust couldn’t have taken them far. But the approach and rendezvous display showed nothing at all. Teresa switched to a higher scale.

Nothing. The station was nowhere.

Mark whispered. “What happened to it?”

Teresa changed radar settings, expanding scale again and ordering a full-spectrum doppler scan. This time, at last, a scattering of blips appeared. Her mouth suddenly tasted ashen.

“There’s… pieces of it.”

A cluster of large objects had entered much higher orbit, rising rapidly as Pleiades receded in her own ellipse. One transmitted an emergency beacon, identifying it as part of the station’s central complex.

“We better do a circularization burn,” Mark said, “to have a chance of rescuing anybody.”

Teresa blinked once more. I should’ve thought of that.

“Check… check all the tank and line pressures first,” she said, still staring at the mess that had been the core of Reagan Station. Something had rent the tethers… and all the spars connecting the modules, for good measure. That force might return anytime, but they owed it to their fellow spacers to try to save those left alive.

“Pressures look fine,” Mark reported. “Give me a minute to compute a burn. It’ll be messy.”

“That’s okay. We’ll use up our reserves. Kennedy and Kourou are probably already scrambling launchers—” She stopped, ears perked to a strange tapping sound. Another symptom? But no, it came from behind her. She swiveled angrily. If that damned Spivey had come back…

A face in the rear window made Teresa gasp, then she sighed. It was only their inadvertent hitchhiker, the space-suited crewman, his helmet still pressed against the perspex screen.

“Hmph,” she commented. “Our guest doesn’t look as pissed off as before.” In fact, the expression behind the steamed-up faceplate beamed unalloyed gratitude. “He must have seen Nearpoint come apart. By now it may already be in the atmos…”

She stopped suddenly. “Jason!”

“What?” Mark looked up from the computer.

“Where’s the upper tip? Where’s Farpoint!”

Teresa scrabbled at the radar display, readjusting to its highest scale on autofrequency scan — taking in the blackness far from Earth just in time to catch a large blip that streaked past the outer edge of the screen.

“Sweet Gaia… look at the doppler!” Randall stared. “It’s moving at… at…” He didn’t finish. Teresa could read the screen as well as he.

The glowing letters lingered, even after the fleeting blip departed. They burned in the display and in their hearts.

Jason, Teresa thought, unable to comprehend or cope with what she’d seen. Her voice caught, and when she finally spoke, it was simply to say, “Six… thousand kilometers… per second.”

It was impossible of course. Teresa shook her head in numb, unreasoning disbelief that Jason would have, could have, done this to her!

“Kakashkiya,” she sighed.

“He’s leaving me… at two percent of the goddamn speed of light…”