"Piers Anthony - Bio of a Space Tyrant 03 - Politician" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

The man ignored me. He changed the setting, and it was like being punched in the stomach. I gasped and fought for breath and tried to retch all at once, but only succeeded in drooling on myself.

"Why?" I rasped as the pain eased, but there was no answer.

The agony moved into my chest, and I thought I was having a heart attack. I strained at my bonds, unable even to scream. It felt like eternity but must have been only a few seconds.

Finally the torture struck my head. The brain feels no pain, but the blood vessels do. The pain blossomed in my skull like bursting arteries, and I sank into an agony of darkness.

I woke in my filthy cell, in more darkness. I did not know how long the interval had been; perhaps only a few minutes. Almost worse than the memory of the pain was the bafflement. Why had the torture been inflicted? I had offered no resistance, not even verbal retort, yet I had been tortured. In what way had I gone wrong? How could I avoid further pain? I did not know.

Why was I here? I did not know that, either. What was my position in life? That, too, was opaque. My captors seemed to be interested only in degradation and agony.

At least I now had a clearer notion where I was. Definitely a ship and not a civilian one. I had spent time in the Jupiter Navy, and ...

There was another fragment of memory. The Navy! But that awareness, like the others, faded as I realized it. Now all I had was the memory of my recollection; it was as if someone had told me, "You were once in the Navy," without providing further detail, so that I had no context.

At any rate, I knew ships, and the little I had seen of this one was enough to narrow the possibilities considerably. It was a military vessel but not a standard one. It was too small to be a battleship, cruiser, or carrier; too big for a gunboat. It was silent; no motors hummed. That was peculiar. The only small ship designed for silence while in operation was-

A sub.

A sub was a very special type of ship. It was a military vessel dedicated to secrecy, to virtual invisibility in space. In the historic days, most naval vessels floated, on the surface of Earth's oceans of water (what a mind-staggering concept: all that water!), plainly visible, protecting themselves with armor and armament. Subs-actually, originally, submarines, being submersible in the fluid of the sea-were largely undetectable and so represented a formidable menace to surface ships. They carried torpedoes that could hole other vessels that never perceived the threat against them until too late, and later they carried missiles that even menaced land targets. This was especially true in the nuclear age of the twentieth century, about seven hundred years ago-how time flies!-and I suspect was one of the factors that spurred man's colonization of the Solar System. After all, what sensible person would care to reside on a planet whose cities were subject to obliteration by missiles launched elsewhere on that same planet? It's bad enough as it is now, when the threat of annihilation is merely interplanetary. Today we have greater warning.

Or do we? Today's subs are very similar to the ancient waterbound ones. In fact, any spaceship resembles the old. submarine, in that it is tightly sealed against a hostile exterior environment. Then that environment was water under high pressure, always threatening to implode the vessel and crush everything inside to pulp. Today it is the vacuum of space, threatening, as it were, to suck everything out. In each case, the occupants cannot depart their ship without employing protective gear, and few care to go out, anyway. Modern subs are specifically similar to their ancestral vessels in that they still carry torpedoes and missiles and remain concealed in the depths of the environment.

How is this possible in bright open solar space? Oh, yes, it's always sunshine here; only on the limited backsides of planets does natural darkness occur. We become so accustomed to our structured cycles of day and night, patterned exactly after those of old Earth, that we tend to forget that it is not that way naturally. The murk of the ocean water concealed the ancients, but there is little murk for the moderns. The subs of either age make themselves physically quiet by damping down the sounds they generate and, when pressed, turning off all power and drifting "dead" in water or space. It is difficult to spot a small dead object in space, for space is immense. There may still be uncharted planetoids orbiting the sun. Consider how long it took for Earthly telescopes to identify our companion star, Nemesis. But in the vicinity of an inhabited planet a sub's mere silence is not sufficient, for the space there is constantly explored by radar. Nevertheless, subs often evade detection. To understand how this is possible, it is necessary to grasp the general nature of radar and similar systems.

Radar is simply an electronic signal broadcast into space. When it encounters an object, it bounces back to its source. A receiver notes that returning signal and calculates the distance by the time required for the signal to return. This is normally a reliable procedure, except when the region is crowded with a confusing number of objects, such as the particles of a planetary ring system. Even then, a properly programmed computer can identify all of the natural and "friendly" objects in the vicinity and highlight the suspicious ones. But the principle remains: The computer depends on the returning signals to spot the objects. If no signal returns the machine assumes that region of space is clear. This seems reasonable enough.

But suppose you could evade or divert the signal, so that it did not bounce back? Reflect it to the side instead of back? Or simply absorb it? That is what a sub does. It uses a special gravity shield to form a black-hole effect that absorbs all incoming energy, including the radar signals. That makes it effectively invisible to radar. Of course some care is necessary; if a sub passes between a person and the

sun, it will show up as a dark blot. It also blots out the light of any star it occludes. Parties watching for subs are alert for this and pay close attention to what isn't visible, such as a particular star, as well as what is. Again, a programmed computer can constantly verify the positions of all light sources and signal alarm when any fail even momentarily. But a carefully maneuvered sub can avoid occluding any sufficiently bright stars while it floats near a planet and so remain invisible-up to a point. Close to a planet there are too many watching satellites, and the silhouette of the sub looms proportionately larger until concealment is impossible.

So most subs remain deep enough in space to hide but as close to the target planet as feasible, covering it with their deadly missiles. Jupiter subs surround Saturn, and Saturnine subs surround Jupiter. If war should break out the planet-to-planet missiles might well be intercepted before scoring, but sub-to-planet missiles could devastate any city on any planet. That is the true balance of terror. Subs, more than any other factor, contribute to the general feeling of insecurity on every planet; no one can be sure that his city would survive a third System war-and there is a general fear that such a war is inevitable. It makes planetary populations edgy, in much the way that a man threatened with arbitrary execution might be edgy. There are reasonably frequent flare-ups of protest and even violence scattered around the System, but no one has found a way to diffuse the threat. Perhaps one of the major appeals of the difficult life in the Belt is that the widely scattered settlements there would be most likely to survive a System war.

So I was in a sub. What was the significance of that? This was surely not a missile sub; those were too precious for the mere torturing of mem-washed captives. But escape from any sub was hopeless to the nth power. I couldn't flash a light out a porthole, for the signal-damping field would extinguish that. Theoretically I might surprise someone, grab a weapon, and take over the ship, but that sort of heroic is feasible only in fiction, and not the best fiction at that. In real life ships have safeguards, such as automatic sleep gas released into the air when unauthorized personnel step onto the bridge, and secret codes for the life systerns support and drive computers. Only the regular personnel could operate this ship; I knew that without needing verification. It was one of the advantages of my Navy experience: I knew what wasn't practical. All I could do was try to steal a suit and escape the ship-and outside was only the void.

My presence here also meant that some military outfit was in charge, for civilians did not have subs of any kind and neither did pirates. Only governments. That meant I was the captive of a nation. Was I a hostage? Then why the mem-wash, degradation, and torture? That didn't seem to make a lot of sense. It would help if I could remember my position in life, but evidently they didn't want me to know it. Maybe I was some high military officer who knew something about an enemy nation's covert operations; they had kidnapped me and now were trying to erase that knowledge from my mind. Yet the torture wouldn't help do that. . . .

The panel opened again, blindingly. I clamped my eyes shut again. Something dropped beside me; then the panel closed.

I felt about me and found a soiled package. It was a loose net enclosing a hard loaf of bread and a soft plastic bottle of fluid. This was my meal, and it was already soiled with my own excrement.

I discovered I was ravenous. But how could I eat bread smeared with fecal matter? If I did it would only process through my system to become more excrement. Yet what choice did I have? If I did not eat I would starve.

I wiped off the bread as well as I could against my upper arm. In the darkness I couldn't see how well I was doing, but when I bit into it, I could tell that the job was incomplete; some refuse had been absorbed by the crust. I controlled my finicky reflex, uncertain how long it would be before I received anything more to eat. I drank the fluid; it seemed to be straight water.

As I finished the bread, I chewed down on something hard. Startled and pained, though the sensation was only a whisper of what I had felt during the torture session, I dropped my jaw reflexively without opening my mouth. The object jumped to my throat and I swallowed it before I

could control myself. The thing tried to catch in my throat, scraping it; I had to gulp the last of my water to get it clear.