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

There have always been a lot of funerals without bodies at the edges of civilization, I suppose. There still were. A ship doesn't come back. Somebody pushes the wrong button and a ship explodes. People get eaten. There are lots of ways.
Finally, the cover slab with sixty names on it was carefully set down over the grey concrete shell that defined the grave. A few centimeters of dirty water were trapped in a puddle in the bottom.
We trooped back to the pressurized quarters and the wardroom. There was to be a reception there.
Joslyn and I hung back. We stood on the surface of the moon Columbia a while longer. When humanity came to this system, this, the planet Kennedy's only large moon, had had a wispy methane atmosphere and a lot of water ice locked up in polar icecaps. Now the engineers were hard at work in a dozen projects to remake it into a better place. Some day their work would be done and this world would live. Already, the air pressure was up to a third of what Earth's was. But it was still a dank, miserable bog of a world, cold and moody, the air poisonous. It rained too much.
Silently, I bid our comrades a last farewell, and we went inside.
Once in our quarters, it took us a while to get out of our pressure suits and into our dress uniforms, with the grim addition of an issue black armband.
I struggled into the midnight-black, high-collared, rather severe uniform of the Republic of Kennedy Navy. Joslyn, a native of the Planetary Commonwealth of Britannica, was thereby a loyal subject of the King-Emperor of Great Britain. Her uniform was a deep navy blue, with a lower collar, far fewer buttons, and a better cut. Both of us wore the insignia of the League of Planets Survey Service, a starfield superimposed on a rectangular grid. Both of us were lieutenants, assigned to special training classes at the League of Planets Survey Service Training Center on Columbia.
Joslyn checked her appearance in the mirror. She said she was five foot seven and I was six four. I said she was 170 centimeters and I was 193. She was slender, well-muscled and strong. Her face was oval, her lips full, and she had a full set of dimples when she smiled. Her hair was a shade between brunette and blonde. She grew it long and braided it. It was long enough to hang to the small of her back. Now she had the braid coiled on top of her head. She pulled her tunic straight and checked her profile, giving me a smile and a wink in the mirror. She might be slender, but even in a dress uniform, she was definitely female. She satisfied herself as to her own appearance and turned to me. She patted my tunic smooth and brushed some lint from my sleeve.
"You'll do," she said, "but if they ever put padded shoulders in those uniforms, you'll never fit through the doorway." Suddenly, she threw her arms around my neck, pulled my head down, and gave me a most unmilitary kiss. She looked me in the eye and sighed. "Mac, I do love you so."
I tickled her under the ear and smiled back. "Never mind that stuff. You sure I look okay?"
"Oh, you'll do. That is, if one likes Greek gods."
I looked in the mirror and shrugged. I've always felt I looked like a refugee from a comic book. Broad shoulders, plenty of muscles, I suppose, kind of a narrow waist. My face is long and lantern-jawed. I've got light blonde hair and the blue eyes to go with them. My smile is a little uneven, but it's friendly enough. My arms and legs are long, my hands and feet big. I take the largest size they issue in practically everything.
Growing up, I was the kid who tripped over his own two feet and tended to smack into walls. My body got bigger than my coordination could handle for a while there. Nowadays, Joslyn can escort me to the dance floor in perfect safety; I can even waltz. Nonetheless, in regulation formal dress I look about the size and shape of the angel of death.
We headed to the wardroom.
We, the survivors, should have been able to gather quietly together, drawn to each other by the bonds of comradery that linked us one to the other, and to the dead.
But the government representatives here had to be treated diplomatically. Some were from nations and planets that opposed the Survey, others from places that were footing the bill. Captain Driscoll had to invite them, and many had come.
Joslyn went off in search of drinks. I stood there and scanned the crowd for a friendly face. Pete Gesseti caught my eye and came over.
Pete works for the Republic of Kennedy State Department, and is one of those rare people who can actually make you believe that the bureaucracy knows what it is doing. He is intelligent, open, and calm. A friendly warning from Pete has kept plenty of people out of trouble. Pete knew my father-and kept me out of trouble.
If not for Pete, I'd probably be just another of the orphan punks that cause Hyannisport police to travel in pairs.
Pete is of medium height, his brown hair retreating toward baldness, his face permanently calm.
He came over and shook my hand. "This isn't the right sort of occasion, but I haven't seen you since. Congratulations on your commission, Second Lieutenant Terrance MacKenzie Larson, sir."
"Thanks, Pete."
He raised his glass to me and took a sip. Joslyn returned and handed me my drink. "Two more congratulations. Or three. On your commission, Lieutenant Joslyn Marie Cooper Larson. On your marrying him. And on his marrying you. Cheers."
We clinked our glasses and smiled. Pete went on. "Sorry I missed the wedding. I understand the Reverend Buxley was spellbinding. I couldn't get leave."
"We understand, Peter. It was pretty short notice," Joslyn said. "Once we decided to marry, we didn't see much point in waiting."
"The wedding aside, at least you didn't miss a trip to someplace worth going," I said.
"True, I guess. Though the League should have picked someplace a lot better than this to train you kids. And I have a sneaky idea that putting you in this hole was the deliberate policy of certain people who want the Survey to fail, if you're interested in a little paranoia."
"What?"
"Mac-tell me this: How does Columbia rate as a training base for a space-going operation?" Pete has a tendency to snap from one subject to another quickly. He takes some keeping up with.
"Well, okay-not so great."
"Make that terrible. You guys should be in free orbit. That way, if you want to train in your ships, you just hop out the hatch and go to it. Here, since your ships aren't designed to land on a surface, you lose a lot of time taking shuttle craft back and forth. Makes schedules impossible. Even having to fly through this atmosphere is worthless as training. It's a freak since the terraforming engineers started tinkering with it. It hasn't stopped raining here for years, which must be great for morale. The air would kill you, so you have to wear suits. The methane leaks in anyway, and stinks to high heaven. The whole atmosphere is in transition: All kinds of crud precipitates and ruins equipment. . . ."
"Okay, you've made your point. It's not such a great base. So who is it that got the base put here?"
"You kids are lucky this is my third drink or I'd still be a fairly discreet diplomat. People who wanted the Survey to fail. Those people had friends who arranged for some misguided members of the Kennedy Chamber of Commerce to lobby for you to be based here-if you follow that. They would like the Survey to fail because the British donated the ten long-range frigates you'll be flying, because your commander graduated from Annapolis, and because the reports are to be published in English. They think the Brits and the Yanks are plotting to lay claim to all the best real estate out there. Note Britannica, Kennedy, and Newer Jersey are the prime planets so far-Europa, for example, isn't all that habitable. There are some grounds for being suspicious. Anyone you met at this reception speaking French, or German, or Japanese, for example, would probably be just as happy if you had all been on the Venera when she went poof."
"You're not suggesting the Venera. ..." I began.
"Was nuked on purpose? No. But it has crossed my mind that your friends aren't dead."
"Pete-you're going too fast. We're at their funeral, or didn't you notice?"
"Hmmmm. Look, I'll finish the thought and then forget I said anything. But the Venera fits a pattern. In the last ten years or so, there have been at least 30 cases in which something like this happens: a proven, reliable ship takes off, on a well-known route. A number of highly skilled people are on board. Some evidence-in the manifest, say-is sometimes found to suggest that someone bribed their way on board, or stowed away, or whatever. The ship vanishes. No wreckage, no explanation. The ship ends up listed Lost With All Hands, and they put the files away. I get a funny feeling sometimes that someone is. setting up shop on some backwater planet. Needs more skilled people than he's got, so he kidnaps the talent he needs. Now forget I ever said that, because I'd hate to fib and deny any such idea ever went through my head." He sipped his drink.
I stood there, too surprised by the idea to react. Joslyn wasn't going to let the subject drop, though. "Peter, if you believe that, why aren't you out organizing a search party?"
"Joslyn, please-okay, I know that look. I give up. I guess I've gone far enough that it doesn't matter. Listen. One: No way to prove it. Two: I could not face giving all but certainly false hope to thousands of people who are relatives and friends of people lost on unaccounted-for ships. Three: As the saying goes, it's a big galaxy. We've been in star travel for 100 years, and have yet to visit a tenth of the star systems within a hundred light years of Earth. Four: Sooner or later, we will stumble across them-next year, next millennia-if we keep looking for habitable planets. If something like the Survey gets off the ground and is out there doing the looking. I spend a lot of government time on the Survey. My superiors complain about it at times. So let's leave it alone and talk about the weather. Has it stopped raining yet?"
"Not for another fifty years or so," I said. "We get the message." We murmured something in the direction of a goodbye and circulated among the guests. I went through the motions, mostly on automatic.
My head was whirling with confusion. I had never paid much attention to politics. It had never occurred to me that someone would think ill of the Survey, let alone try and throw monkey wrenches at it. And past that, way past that, the wild thought that all those people might still be alive.... I understood why Pete wasn't wholesaling his theory. I had known him all my life, and it had taken a funeral that might have been mine and a few drinks too many for him to mention it to me. How could he ever bring himself to suggest it to strangers?
And then there were the rumblings that the Survey Service was to be stillborn. We had yet to send a single ship out on a survey mission. Ours, the first class of the Service, had been about a month from graduation when the Venera was lost. I had figured the loss would slow us down to a crawl, but could it really stop us? With all that to worry about, it was a lousy party, even for a funeral.
Some hours after, I was alone in the view room. An overhanging roof shielded the oversize view window from the worst of the rain so that it was possible to see something of the dismal surface of Columbia, and of her sullen sky. Now it was night, and Kennedy gleamed boldly down through the high cloud deck.
I looked up again at the sullen sky, and thought of the stars behind the dirty clouds.
So many stars. . . .
In the vicinity of Earth's sun, the star systems are about five light years apart, on the average. That works out to about 64,000 stars within a hundred light years of Earth. Our home solar system is a good sample of what you can expect to find in an average star system-nine or ten good-sized planets, 40 or 50 noticeable satellites, and a few trillion pieces of sky junk from the size of a rogue moon down to individual atoms and elementary particles.
There's plenty of variety that goes past the average to the incredible. If every human alive now, in 2115, were put to work as a scientist or an explorer, and passed their jobs along to every one of their descendants, it would still take a thousand years to get together a basic catalog of what we know is out there to learn within that 100 light years.
Consider the infinite variety of Earth-the geology, the hydrology, the atmosphere, the biology, the physical reality of our ancestral home. Multiply it by the number of worlds waiting to be found, and you'll begin to understand the problem.
Exploration is not something to do out of idle curiosity. Knowing what is out there is an urgent need, and getting more so every year.
Around the beginning of the third millennium, the experiments were performed that took faster-than-light travel from an impossibility to a laboratory trick to a way to haul freight. Humanity, barely staggering into the third thousand years alive, found that the stars had been dropped in its lap. The explorers went out.