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

Some of them came back. The settlers followed in their paths. More than once, settlers went out blazing their own trails. Very few of that number were ever heard from again.
Yet, by the year 2025, the United States Census Bureau estimated the off-Earth population as over 1 million for the first time. Ten years later, the figure was twice that, and the pace accelerating. By 2050, rapid emigration and high birth-rates had pushed the minimum estimate to 10 million. Even to this day, the Census people try to keep track of it. At the moment, the best guess is 85 million people. That is, 85 million, plus or minus 20 million!
The colonists went out, poorly organized, often toward nothing more definite than the hope that they might find a place to settle and live. Few managed that. One job of the Survey was to find these people, and to establish a reliable catalog of habitable planets, so the next generation of colony ships might go out with a better chance of survival.
And we were to locate bounty, the incredible riches that literally hang in the sky. What new mineral, born in exotic heat and pressure, waited for uses to be found and a market established? Where were mountain-sized lumps of pure nickel-iron, orbiting in darkness, waiting for a factory ship to take possession? Where were the lovely green worlds waiting for people to come and live on them? What new plants, new animals, would be worth exporting?
Surely it must have been obvious to everyone there was a need to explore. Just as obviously, it was a job for the governments of humanity to take on. Obvious to everyone except the governments, that is. Governments are supposed to lead, but they have been following the people ever since our race entered space in a big way.
The first crunch came in the 2030s or so. By that time, there were a good half dozen colony planets-and a bad dozen. Nations and consortiums that certainly could not afford to do so established colonies anyway. True, the founding colonies had done great good for the nations that could afford the great capital expense. But a poor nation goes bankrupt long before its colony starts to pay any returns. The pattern was repeated many times. The nation, or the colony, or both, would collapse, and people would start to die. To the richness of space we brought war, riot, pestilence, and starvation. It happened in a dozen different ways on a dozen different worlds.
The big nations, and the healthy colonies, many of them completely independent by this time, got tired of bailing out the failures after a while. The United States, the Asian and European powers, the strong colonies- Kennedy, Britannica, Europa, New Alberta, Newer Jersey, and the others-came to the conference table. By every means possible, they coerced the little and the weak to join them-The Estonian Republic, The People's Federal Protectorate of Chad, Uruguay, colonies like New Antarctica and High Albania, the O'Neill colonies, the self-contained (and self-righteous) free-flying colonies in orbit around Earth.
Some big countries were part of the problem: China had pulled off some truly remarkable failures in space by this time. Many of the smaller nations and colonies were among the most responsible members of the conference: Sweden; Singapore, and her "daughter," the O'Neill colony High Singapore; Portugal; Finland; and New Finland were strong backers of the enterprise.
The delegates bickered. They threatened each other. They indulged in back-room deals that are still causing scandals today. But they managed to come up with a treaty.
So, on January 1, 2038, at 0000 hours GMT and Zero hours Accumulated Stellar Time (AST), the League of Planets came into being and its founding document, the Treaty of Planets, came into effect.
By 0000 hours GMT on January 2, or 24 hours AST, the League was evacuating the hapless residents of New Antarctica and treating them for frostbite.
The delegates came up with a system that works. Its basic tenet sets the right of a human being to live over the right of an idiot to run a government as if it were a family business.
When the League came into being, ground rules were set up for the founding of colonies. Folks could still bug out and vanish if they wanted to, but fewer people did so by accident. Fewer people starved. When the Fast Plague came to Kennedy, the Interworld Health Organizations (which is one of the pieces of the League that actually predates it, somehow-like the International Court of Justice at The Hague) came in, and their aid saved us. There is no possible question on that point. That's why the Republic of Kennedy is very pro-League.
There are other good things. There are fewer tinhorn dictators taking over small colonies with still-weak governments. Trade is reliable, not for gamblers anymore.
I stood there and looked out at the gloomy night. It occurred to me that I must have been pretty naive to think that politics wasn't going to affect the Survey- not with a history like the League's.
I must have been there for nearly an hour, nursing a drink. An orderly came for me.
"Lieutenant Larson?"
"Mmmmm?"
"Excuse me, sir, but Captain Driscoll's compliments, and could you come to her office right away?"
I followed the young man along the well-known route to Driscoll's office.
The orderly led me into the office and vanished. Joslyn was there already-and so was Pete Gesseti. As I came in, Driscoll was just handing him back a sheaf of papers. He slipped them back into a folder marked REPUBLIC OF KENNEDY STATE DEPARTMENT CLASS A CLEARANCE ONLY***TOP SECRET.
I exchanged glances with Joslyn, but she just shook her head. They hadn't told her anything yet. Pete's expression was one of pure bemusement, a bad job at a poker face.
Driscoll ignored me for a moment and simply sat there, staring into space, chewing on the end of a pencil. Gillian Driscoll didn't do that sort of thing much. A good loud voice that expected to be obeyed was more her style.
She was a small, rather compactly built woman-one who punched out walls when she felt frustrated. Her face was round, and a bit plain. Her skin had a rough, windblown look to it. She kept her hair cut short to the point of severity, for the sake of convenience. She was capable of using makeup artfully, though, and had presented a pretty picture in her full dress uniform earlier in the evening. She fought a tendency to plumpness when she got stuck behind a desk for any amount of time. That wasn't one of her current problems: she led the courses in hand-to-hand combat and survival training. She was of Irish descent, more or less, and her blue eyes and red hair came with a button nose to prove it.
Now she was in standard-issue sneakers and coverall. She seemed to come to herself, and saw I was there. "Mac. Good. Sit down. We've got to do some talking here."
I sat down.
Captain Driscoll drummed her fingers on the the desk and muttered darkly to herself for a moment. Then she spoke up. "Pete, you tell it. Let me hear it again. Maybe I can think a bit."
"Right," Pete said to her, then turned to Joslyn and myself. "First off, do you know how the Survey Service got hold of the ships you are supposed to fly?"
"Donated by the British, right?" I asked.
"Not exactly. You've got ten ships designated as Survey Ships. They used to be long-duration patrol frigates, the plan being to have enough of them to be able to send one or two into a trouble spot and have the ships' firepower hold things together until the political types came in and tidied things up. Now His Majesty's government contracted for 100 such ships with Imperial Shipyards, with a clause calling for an additional ten to be built. H.M.G. thought the extension clause was activated by notification, Imperial thought it was cancellable by notification. The contractor was a dozen light years from the purchasing office. The upshot is that the Brits got ten more ships than they wanted, and the bill for same.
Turns out they didn't even need the hundred original ships. However, the International Court at The Hague ruled for Imperial, once it got that far. So the Brits had the ships with no budget for operating them, and no use for them anyway. So they leased them to the League for a pound a year. Think of it as their taking a tax loss. Now. In the five years since they got stuck, the British have lost a few ships through accident, and on top of that, they now have more real estate to cover. They decide maybe they could use ten more ships after all. The current lease expires in about 45 days-Earth days, whatever the hell that is in hours."
"To conclude the story and bring you right up to date, your friend Mr. Gesseti has just broken a number of laws, regulations, and treaties to show me a diplomatic message intercept sent from London to the British Embassy on Kennedy," Driscoll said.
"Some of the back-room boys cracked their diplomatic code a while ago," Pete said. "We pulled it off the relay satellite, picked it up, and read it before the British did-fortunately for you people," Pete explained, without a hint of shame. "London was telling the embassy to sort of turn cool on the Survey people. They're pulling their liaison officer soon, and they're thinking of taking the ships back, if politically feasible."
"The cable predates the loss of the Venera," Driscoll pointed out. "With the British supporting us at the League, we could weather the loss of personnel. With our establishment intact, it wouldn't be 'politically feasible' to grab the ships this close to graduating the first group."
"But, as things stand now, you're screwed," Pete said blandly.
"So what do we do?" Joslyn asked.
"Do. What do we do?" Driscoll pulled open a drawer, extracted a bottle and glass, and poured herself a drink. "We take our 34 surviving crew members, put them on the ten ships that are supposed to have crews of nine each, and send them out before the League bureaucracy has time to cut our head off."
"Ma'am. With all due respect, that can't work!" I said.
"Mac, you may be right. But unless the survey ships launch now, they never will. We have to get them out of orbit and at their proper work."
"But can't you rush the next class though? Or use the instructors?" Joslyn asked.
"The very first things I thought of. The second class- hell, those kids haven't even been inside one of the survey ships yet. Most of them haven't done the survival course yet, none of them are checked out on astrogation to the point where I'd trust them completely even on the Kennedy-Britannica run, let only on a trip between two poorly-charted stars. They aren't anywhere near trained. And the instructors, strangely enough, are even worse. They're all specialists. Scanlan is the best fusion-reactor and power system expert in 30 light years-but she's never even been in a pressure suit. Jamie Sheppard is turning you all into experts on your pressure suits, but he doesn't know a damn thing about piloting. No. It's you. Your class. Or we don't go."
There was silence for a moment, and then Captain Driscoll spoke again. "One more little problem: ten doesn't go into 34. Also, some of the kids aren't quite good enough for three to be a safe crew. But you two." She paused. "I'm sending out two crews of four. Three crews of three. And one crew of two. You two. You're married, so you're supposed to be compatible. Our hottest pilot and a young man who's been at the head of every class he was ever in, what they call a 'born leader.' Joslyn, you're now a First Lieutenant. Mac, you have the rank-brevet-of commander, and as soon as I sign this piece of paper, you are the skipper of League of Planets Survey Ship 41. You launch in no more than 200 hours- before the damn pols can react to the loss of the Venera."
Shock was scarcely the word. Me? Skipper? Launch in 200 hours? The Brits pulling the rug out from under us? I looked around the room in a daze, until my eye met Pete's.
He just grinned. "Congratulations, again."
"Peter, this was your idea," Joslyn said accusingly.
"Wrong that time, Joslyn," Driscoll said. "I worked it out myself. But let's just say his handing me that cable made my conclusions inevitable." For a moment there was a smile on her face. Then, suddenly, she seemed smaller and tireder than I had ever seen her.
"You won't even ask us to volunteer?" Joslyn asked her.
"Would you have?"
Joslyn looked to me, I to her. Her face betrayed an attempt to look only to the rational, to look carefully at what was best, whatever her feelings. I could see the decision she reached, and nodded my agreement, imperceptibly to anyone but her. "Yes," she said, simply.
Captain Driscoll rose. "Then let the record show such. Lieutenant Cooper. Commander Larson. I ask you freely to volunteer for the hazardous duty in question. Answer upon your honor." Her voice took a hard, formal tone.