"Allen, Roger Macbride - Allies And Aliens 1 - Torch Of Honor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

The Torch of Honor
By Roger MacBride Allen


PRELUDE

April, 2115

The Finns knew the Guardians had won. It was over. The Guardians had taken the planet's surface, and now the surrender of the great satellite Vapaus would go into effect in a few hours. The Guardians themselves had caused a delay of the surrender by insisting it be negotiated strictly in English. The Finns, desperately playing for time, stalled for as long as possible, taking hours to search for the English-speaking officer they could have produced in moments.
The time was put to urgent use. The last, the only hope, thin though it might be, was the League. Word had to be sent.
Six of the last torpedoes were stripped of armament. Light-speed-squared generators and radio beacons were installed. Recordings that held the vital knowledge of the anti-ship missile system, and what little information the Finns had on the Guardians, were placed aboard.
Word had to get through.
The Guardians had not yet closed the ring around Vapaus. Three tiny one-man ships were launched from the Forward airlock complex, each with two torps strapped to jury-rigged harnesses amidships. The little ships launched at six gees, to fly straight through the Guardian fleet. The enemy's radar was too good to be fooled by any feinting maneuver; speed was the only protection.
It was not protection enough. The lead ship was destroyed in seconds by laser fire from a troop transport. The Finnish pilot's last act was to blow the fusion engines; the resultant explosion created a plasma that jammed every radar screen and radio within a thousand kilometers. That gave the two remaining ships their chance as they flashed into and beyond the gathering fleet.
They dove down to lower orbits, rushing to get the sheltering bulk of the planet between themselves and the enemy's radar before it could recover from the explosion the Finns' lead ship had died in.
They fell toward the planet, gathering speed for a gravity-assist maneuver. One hundred eighty degrees around the planet from the satellite Vapaus, they both changed course, maneuvering violently, one coming about to fly a forced orbit straight over the planet's North Pole, the second heading over the South Pole.
As soon as the ships had reached their new headings, they cut their engines for a moment, and each released a torp. Then the two ships and the two released torpedoes ignited their engines and flashed on into the sky, the torps holding course, the ships again changing their headings.
The southern ship was caught and destroyed by a Nova fighter scrambled from the planet's surface. The northern ship released its second torp and came about, one final time, to act as a decoy for the torps.
Soon, all too soon, another fusion explosion lit the sky, marking the point where a Guardian missile had found the last Finnish ship.
The Guardians tracked only the last torpedo launched, and they were able to destroy it.
Of the six torpedoes, two now survived, undetected. Engines still burning, they curved around the world in exactly opposite directions, one over the South Pole, one over the North, their courses bent by the planet's gravity until they came about to identical bearings.
The torps cut their engines precisely over the Poles, just as they reached escape velocity.
Each now rose on a straight-line course starting from a point directly over a pole and parallel to the equator, the paths of the torps also parallel to each other.
Engines stopped, they rushed through space, coasting, trusting to the cold and dark of the void to hide them.
Hours after launch, when they were hundreds of thousands of kilometers beyond the orbit of the moon Ku, celestial trackers on each torp examined the starfield. The maneuvering thrusters fired fussily and touched up the torps' headings. The two torps were now on precise headings for the Epsilon Eridani star system, where the English had their colony world, Britannica. The torpedoes were still far too close to New Finland's sun to go into light-speed-squared. For long weeks they coasted on into the darkness, while behind them, the Guardians worked their horrors on the Finns.
On one torp, the power system failed and the torp became another of the useless derelicts in the depths of space.
But the other torp, the last one, held on to life. And at the proper moment, the light-speed-squared generator absorbed nearly all the torp's carefully husbanded power and grabbed at the fabric of space around the torpedo.
The last torp leaped across the dark between the suns.
Soon after, with weak batteries, the radio beacon barely detectable, the torpedo drifted into the Epsilon Eridani system.
Just barely, the last torp made it.

PART ONE:
AN EMPTY GRAVE,
A HOLLOW WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

January, 2115

A cold, drizzly rain spattered the faceplate of my pressure suit as the chaplain droned through the funeral service, there at the edge of the empty grave.
The metal and rubber arm of my helmet's windshield wiper slithered back and forth across my field of vision, clearing the rain away. This was probably the only world humanity had bothered to settle where a pressure suit needed a wiper. We all had them, the wiper blades endlessly waving, side to side, like the mouthparts of giant locusts.
They were gone, dead, missing in the depths of space. Sixty of our classmates. Their ship simply vanished en route back from one final training cruise. There had been exactly one hundred of us when we had started out. Of course there had been other losses to our ranks- other accidents, candidates who had been dropped-but now there was this. There were only 34 of us left to stand on the miserable plain.
"Vanity, vanity, saith the preacher," intoned our chaplain. "We bring nothing into this world, and we take nothing out." The words might as well have been a recording. The chaplain's voice made me think of dried-out toast. He talked on in gravelly, portentous tones, plucking old morsels from half the books of scripture, a shopworn service to be dragged out for all funerals and sad occasions. "What is man, that thou are mindful of him?" he asked, his voice rising for a moment, and then sliding back down to a low grumble.
A light blinked on the telltale board inside my helmet, and I kicked my radio over to a private channel.
"Mac, this man is awful. Can't we make him be quiet, so we could at least stand here and think?" Joslyn asked. She and I had been married by the same chaplain three months ago. He had taken two minutes over our vows and 45 minutes on a rambling sermon that put half the congregation to sleep.
"Just keep your suit radio cut off," I suggested.
"But then I could still see his great jaw flapping. And now he's glaring at us. Best we listen. Oh, Mac, they deserve a better send-off." She slipped her gauntleted hand into mine and we switched back to the general circuit.
"Dear Lord, we commit to your care and keeping the immortal souls of these, the departed. We pray you to welcome and cherish the souls of Lieutenant Daniel Ackerman, Lieutenant Lucille Calder, Lieutenant Commander Joseph Danvers...."
Nice touch, I thought. He's got them memorized in alphabetical order.
The empty grave was a regulation hole, one meter wide, two meters long, two meters deep. I looked up into the sky through the gloomy overcast at the blue-and-white globe that hung there. It was there, on the planet Kennedy, that the tradition of the empty grave had arisen. There, during the Fast Plague, it had been rare to have a body to put in the ground. The corpses had been viciously infectious. The only sure way of sterilizing the remains was to destroy them in the fusion flame of a grounded spacecraft. That was what happened to my parents' bodies-I remember the patches of dim incandescence in the cleansing flame. There was a an empty grave there, on Kennedy, a meter by a meter by two meters; on top of it a granite cover slab that bore their names.