"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles of Solace 3 - Shores of Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

Neshobe made her way up two decks to her private compartment. Along the way, her security team rematerialized from wherever they had been hovering discreetly, and formed up around herЧone in front, three behind. They were all big, tough, and dedicated. They were all absolutely focused on their dutyЧa very good thing, the way NeshobeТs life was, these days. Once, she had been able to travel with only a minimal security detail, or even, impossible as it might seem, with no protection at all.

Those days were gone. As PlanEx, her primary duty these days was to preside over a mounting series of crises and disasters, none of which she could prevent, and most of which she could do little to make better. It did not make her the most popular of leaders. There had been attempts on her lifeЧa lot of them. She had the idea that there had been more tries than her security team was willing to report, perhaps out of fear of hurting her morale.

So be it. So far, her security people had had 100 percent success in not letting her get killed. She had no reason to question how they did their job. If they wished to be silent as well as invisible, she would not argue. Still, there were times when she was taken aback to realize how much she took them for granted. More than once, she had started to disrobe for the bath while her security team was in the room, simply because she had ceased to be aware of their presence.

Today, however, there was no forgetting them for long. TheLodestar VII was a big ship, and there were a lot of people aboard, and no matter how carefully all of them had been vetted, there was no telling who might be nursing a grudge these days. The endless disasters had cost too many people family members, or property, or fortunes, or status. The security team kept close to her anywhere outside the ultrasecure areas, such as the command center.

They arrived at her cabin, and Neshobe obediently waited in the corridor while two of the team did a careful sweep of it, the other two standing guard over her in the corridor. After a bit, one of the team inside emerged, and signaled the all clear to his fellows.

She entered the cabin and took her place in the crash chair in the center of the room. She made no move to strap herself in. She had learned the hard way, long ago, that there wasnТt any point. Hands more skilled and less gentle than her own adjusted the belts and clips, tugged and pulled to test the restraint. One of the team sealed and locked the hatch from the corridor, while another checked over the hatch to the cabinТs escape pod one last time, then climbed in to check the podТs status board. The first check had been for bombs and assassins hidden in the pod. This check was to make sure the pod itself was in good working order, ready to save Neshobe if need be. The agent nodded in satisfaction and climbed back through the hatch. Apparently all was well. And never mind the fact that there was no good place to escape to, if the ship failed.

Confident that she was properly strapped in, that the door from the corridor was locked, and the escape pod was functioning, the four security operatives strapped themselves in, then vanished from NeshobeТs consciousness. So far as she was concerned, she was alone. She used her seatТs controls to bring up the countdown display and the image of the worlds outside. The world theLodestar VII orbited, and the world that world orbited . . . Wheels within wheels, worlds around worlds. That was the way of it, the essential truth of the situation, written in orbits and in geometry.

Lodestar VIIorbited Greenhouse, and Greenhouse was a medium-sized moon orbiting the gas giant Comfort. Comfort orbited the star HS-G9-223, officially named Lodestar. There was a sort of symmetry about the ship calledLodestar VII orbiting the object that orbited the object that orbited the star called Lodestar. In name, at any rate, the least came round to meet the greatest. It was a notion that appealed to the stratified, neofeudal worldview of rank-conscious Solacian society.

Other worlds circled Lodestar, of courseЧmost significantly, a world called Solace, that poorly terraformed and swiftly failing more or less Earth-like planet. As the display showed, Lodestar was at present behind Comfort as seen from Greenhouse, and Solace was behind Lodestar as seen from Comfort. Put another way, the four bodies were, momentarily, lined up like unevenly spaced beads on a string, thusly:

Greenhouse, Comfort, Lodestar, Solace.

But vital as that alignment was to the Ignition Project, it was not the natural worlds, but artificial suns, that were the central issue.

SunSpot, simply put, was an artificial sun that orbited the small world of Greenhouse once a day, every 27.3 hoursЧprecisely the same period as a Solacian day. The new NovaSpot was circling Greenhouse about eighty kilometers behind SunSpot in the same orbit. Once it was ignited, it would quite literally be a novaЧa new starЧin the skies of Greenhouse.

As Neshobe Kalzant worked to strap herself in, SunSpot and NovaSpot were already between Comfort and Greenhouse. In something like twelve hours and forty-five minutes, the minor outer planet Alloy, home to the mining stations Goldrush Alpha, Goldrush Beta, and Goldrush Gamma, would move behind Greenhouse as seen from the NovaSpot. In other words, the bulk of Greenhouse itself would serve as a radiation shield for Alloy. Shielded by Greenhouse, Alloy would be safe. Similar alignments would shield the other major outer-system population centers.

A handful of smaller free-flying stations had been forced to change orbits, or evacuate for the duration of the Ignition Project, but aside from those trivial exceptions, it was the alignment of the worlds themselves that would serve as natural shields against the hellish blast of radiation that would be part and parcel of igniting NovaSpotТs fires. The engineers and physicists all gave strong assurances that, assuming all went well, NovaSpotТs output of hard radiation would settle down to barely more than the local background of cosmic rays and stellar wind within a few hours of primary reaction initia-tion.

All the inhabited worlds and stations would be shielded by the bulk of Comfort, or the lesser but still quite adequate mass of Greenhouse, or by Lodestar itself, during those hours.

All the worlds save one: Greenhouse itself, the aptly named moon that was the center for terraforming and climatic-repair operations for the entire Solacian system. Without GreenhouseТs expertise and storehouse of diverse genetic material, held in the form of living plants, animals, and microbes, Solace would have collapsed years before, indeed would never have been terraformed in the first place.

Greenhouse was dotted, from pole to pole, with endless domed habitats. Once, long ago, during the main Solace terraforming project, virtually all of them had been operational at the same time, nurseries and genetic labs for the thousands of species that were to be adapted, and then introduced, onto Solace. The domes of Greenhouse had been bursting with life.

But before the Ignition of the first SunSpot, nothing at all was alive on the surface. The original SunSpot had been ignitedbefore the domes were even built, let alone populated with living things. Indeed, the SunSpot was lit before there was much of anything alive anywhere in the Solacian system. The blast of killing radiation produced by the SunSpotТs Ignition hadnТt been much of a problem, simply because there was nothing much for the blast to kill.

The original terraforming plan had seen Greenhouse as an interim home for the living things that were to be transplanted onto Solace. It had been expected that the SunSpot would serve its purpose and that the last of the domes would be shut downЧor simply abandonedЧlong before the SunSpot guttered down to die, its fuel expended. But it hadnТt worked out that way. Solace had never lost its reliance on Greenhouse.

An ecosystem could be considered closed when it received no significant outputs from the outside, aside from raw energy. Earth was a closed ecology, completely reliant on itself, except for the SunТs light and heat. In hindsight, at least, it was clear that the Solacian ecosystem had never really been УclosedФ at all, even after the planet had been officially declared to be terraformed. It had always been an open ecosystem, dependent on outside sources, mainly Greenhouse, for substantial biological inputs, such as additional populations of a plant species that had died out, or additional biomass in the form of raw organic material to serve as foodstock for bacteria, or even new species. Whatever Solace needed to meet the ecologic crisis of the moment, Greenhouse provided. Greenhouse still did so, down to the present day.

But the SunSpot was dying. The engineers had performed miracles to keep it goingЧbut even miracles could only do so much. They had run out of tricks, run out of ways to stretch its dwindling output of light and heat.

And that led directly to the current crisis and the present mad plan of actionЧa plan of action suggested centuries before by Oskar DeSilvo himself, before his supposed death.

DeSilvo. WeТre actually here, getting ready to do what DeSilvo says again. That was the heart of the madness, so far as Neshobe was concerned.

DeSilvo, hero to all those who knew half the story, and devil to the very few who knew it all. DeSilvo had led the effort to terraform Solace. That much, everyone knew. Everyone also knew that the failures, the things that had gone wrong, were all bad luck, or the fault of sloppy management, or a failure to follow properly the plans that DeSilvo had left behind.

One man had learned more only quite recently, and informed Neshobe. At her direction, what they had learned was being kept very, very quiet, for fear of touching off stars alone knew what sort of unrest. Neshobe now knew that DeSilvo was, at the time he was terraforming the planet,in possession of incontrovertible proof that the terraforming attempt would inevitably fail.