"Iron Sunrise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 12 hours, 38 minutes

Twenty-two minutes past departure time and the dogs had rounded up the last stray lamb, herding her into the service lock. Captain Mannheim had other things to worry about this instant, like topping off the number four tank and making sure Misha vented the surplus ullage pressure and kept the flow temperature within good limits. Then he was going to run the launch plan and get the hell out of this ghost system before the storm front blew in, and once clear he’d have it out with the guard dogs. (And why had they let some interfering punk kid sneak around the service core in the first place?) And then …

Twenty-two minutes! More than a thousand seconds overdue! There was room for slippage on the critical path — nobody would be insane enough not to make some allowances — but with five thousand passengers, twenty-two minutes meant all of five person-years of consumables gone just like that, virtually in an eyeblink. The refugee pods had an open-loop life-support system, there being no room for recycling tankage on this relief flight, so the whole exercise was running into millions, tens of millions. Some dumb kid had just cost the burghers of New Dresden about, oh, two thousand marks, and Captain Mannheim about two thousand extra gray hairs.

“What’s our criticality profile looking like?” he demanded, leaning over to glare at Gertrude’s station.

“Ah, all nominal, sir.” Gertrude stared fixedly ahead, refusing to meet his eye.

“Then keep it that way,” he snapped. “Misha! That tank of yours!”

“Vented and closed out within tolerances.” Misha grinned breezily from across the bridge. “The load-out is looking sweet. Oh, and for once the toilet plumbing on number two isn’t rattling.”

“Good.” Mannheim sniffed. The number two reaction motor’s mass-flow plumbing suffered from occasional turbulence, especially when the hydrogen slurry feeding it went over sixteen degrees absolute. The turbulence wasn’t particularly serious unless it turned to outright cavitation, with big bubbles of supercooled gases fizzing inside the pipes that fed reaction mass to the fusion rockets. But that was potentially catastrophic, and they didn’t have any margin for repairs. Not for the first time, Mannheim’s thoughts turned enviously to the beautiful, high-tech liner from Novya Romanov that had pulled out six hours ago on an invisible wave of curved space-time, surfing in the grip of an extremal singularity. No messing with balky, mass-guzzling antiquated fusion rockets for Sikorsky’s Dream! But the Long March was as sophisticated a ship as anything the Dresdener merchant syndicate could afford, and he’d do as well with it as was humanly possible. “Ship! What’s our sequence entry status?”

The robotically smooth voice of the autopilot rolled across the bridge. “Kerberos unit and final passenger boarding notified two minutes ago and counting. Critical path elements in place. Entry status green, no exceptions raised—”

“Then commence launch cycle immediately.”

“Aye. Launch cycle commencing. Station power and utility disconnect proceeding. Station mass transfer disconnect proceeding. Boarding pier disconnect proceeding. Main engine spin-up engaged, station one. Live cargo systems spin-down engaged, station two.”

“I hate live cargo,” Gertrude muttered. “Live cargo spin-down notification going out.” Fingers tapped invisible cells in the air in front of her face. “Hub lift interlocks to safe—”

Mannheim stared at the complex web of dependencies that hovered over the blank wall of the bridge, a meter in front of his nose. Slowly, red nodes blinked to green as the huge starship prepared to cast free of the station. It was supposed to be the last ship ever to sail from this port. From time to time, he prodded a station glyph and spoke quietly to whoever’s voice answered from the thin air: loadmasters and supercargo and immigration control officers and civil polizei, Jack in the drive damage control center and Rudi in the crow’s nest. Once he even talked to Traffic Control. The station’s robot minders plodded on imperturbably, unaware that the end of their labor was in sight, coursing toward them on an expanding shock front of radiation-driven plasma. An hour went by. Someone invisible placed a mug of coffee at his right hand, and he drank, carried on talking and watching and occasionally cursing in a quiet voice, and drank again and it was cold.

Finally, the ship was ready to depart.