"Kevin J. Anderson -1993- Assemblers of Infinity (v1.0) (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J)

A large man next to Dvorak called up a holographic control panel that hung in the air in front of his hands. Other technicians in his cramped control center called out numbers and sent readings down to Earth. The window showing Dvorak's image receded to the upper left corner, while new windows opened to display telemetry, a CAD animation showing the attitude of the hopper, and a rotating globe of the Moon displaying trajectories with a targeting cross over Daedalus crater on the nightside. The largest window on the viewing wall opened up, showing Daedalus as it grew larger each second. Already they could make out the mysterious gossamer structure of the anomaly.

As the hopper flew over, Dvorak refrained from commenting, which Celeste appreciated. Nobody knew what was going on here anyway.

Pritchard drew in a breath as the hopper's medium-resolution camera showed the arcs rising from the dust, the framework of a huge bowl, impossible lacy girders that seemed to have no support whatsoever. It looked as if some gigantic being had played cat's cradle in the middle of a crater.

"Okay, getting some readings now," Dvorak said. "X-ray backscatter shows the materials are extremely hard and light, not very dense. Like an aerogel, except made out of diamond fibers. Maybe it's like the diamond foam they're trying to fabricate in the orbiting labs."

Celeste nodded. Dvorak's voice took on a trace of alarm. "I'm detecting no sign of my crew. Nothing. There should be a rover and a hopper. Not to mention three bodies, three suits. Where the hell are they?"

"What is he talking about?" Pritchard asked. Speaking in a rushed whisper out of the corner of her mouth, Celeste filled him in on the details about Waite, Lasserman, and Snow.

"But how did it get there?" Pritchard said without taking his eyes from the display. "Look at that pit -- to excavate that would have required a few megatons of energy!"

Celeste had forgotten about Pritchard's background as a scientist. "I know. But we detected nothing. I can show you all the traces. The Moon is a million times less active than Earth, and we should have at least seen something. But no seismic activity near Daedalus."

The hopper flew over the wide pit. Was this some surreptitious lunar mining operation? Ore pirates? The thought was so ridiculous Celeste was glad she had not said anything aloud. Even under the dim nightside illumination, the depths of the pit looked as black as tar. If anybody was still working down there, they used no lights.

"Could they -- " the general paused, emphasizing the word they as if afraid to suggest what he might be thinking; Celeste had already begun arguing with herself about the same thing. " -- I mean, could your seismic network have been scrambled somehow? The traces erased?"

"Either that," she said, "or they found some way to excavate that pit and erect those frameworks without causing a a jitter."

"Impossible, isn't it?"

"General, the entire thing is impossible!"

Dvorak interrupted. The CAD viewing window showed the hopper flying away from the pit. They had opted to use all of the vehicle's fuel to survey the site completely and to forego a return flight. "Maneuvering fuel is getting low. That's about all the overhead reconnaissance we can manage if we want to guarantee a safe landing."

"Set the hopper down," Celeste said.

"Go to one of those tower structures," Pritchard suggested.

As the hopper settled down on a flat tract of regolith, Celeste could see the sharp-edged tread marks of one of the lunar construction rovers that had erected the VLF array three years before. The base of a ghostly tower rose seamlessly out of the soil, cutting in half the footprint some worker had left behind. Dust from the hopper's landing clouded the black sky.

Spotlights shone up into the weblike arches. In the upper-left corner of the viewing wall, Lon Newellen played with the telepresence panel. The probe deployed its instruments.

"I'm getting no motion anywhere. Not a tremor, not a heartbeat, just a few jitters left over from landing. This place is as still as a fossil."

Somehow the image reminded Celeste of the great Egyptian pyramids, or the sphinx, or some long-abandoned temple erected at the dawn of time. But this was not old. She kept reminding herself of that.

Data from electromagnetic sounders, mapping spectrometers, chemistry, mineralogy, topography and gravitational sensors scrolled down their own windows at the bottom of the viewing wall, but Dvorak interpreted them. "Not seeing any radiation, no detectable energy surges, but the area temperature is about seven degrees hotter than we can account for. I keep getting ultra-transient blips on the gamma-ray detectors. Too brief to contain any information. I would try to explain them away as glitches, but they're confined to a very discrete energy range. That doesn't make sense."

The image on the screen jerked with a blast of static, then refocused. The static returned, worse this time, and the picture did not wholly recover. The image skewed, with video distortion and graininess. Then the camera swung sideways, as if someone had bumped the entire probe.

"I'm not doing that!" Newellen said, holding his hands up as if to display his innocence.

Several of the probe instruments blared error messages. Two went blank.

"Turn the camera to look at the ground," Celeste said.