"David Drake - Fortress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

"Ah, I think it's important to recall, Mr. Kelly," interjected one of the colonels - it was uncertain which
through the headphones - "that the test was by no means a failure. The test vehicle performed perfectly
throughout eighty-three percent of the spectrum planned - "

"Well good god, Boardman," snapped the project scientist, "it blew up, didn't it? That's what you mean,
isn't it?" Desmond continued, snapping his head around from the officers across the bay to Kelly seated
on the portion of the bench closest to the fully-opened starboard hatch. "I certainly don't consider that,
that fireworks display a success."
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Kelly smiled, the expression only incidentally directed toward the colonels. "Though I gather many of the
systems did work as planned, Doctor?" he said, playing the scientist now that he had enough of a
personality sample from which to work. Even among the project's civilians, there were familiar - and not
wholly exclusive - categories of scientists and scientific politicians. Desmond had seemed to be in the
former category, but Kelly had found no opportunity to speak to him alone.

The public affairs officers were probably intended to smother honest discussion within the spotting
helicopter the same way the administrators had done on the ground. That plan was being frustrated by
what was more than a personality quirk: Desmond could not imagine that anything the military officers
said or wished was of any concern to him. It was not a matter of their rank or anyone's position in a
formal organizational chart: Colonels Boardman and Johnson were simply of another species.

"Yes, absolutely," agreed the project scientist as he shook his head in quick chops. "Nothing went wrong
during air-breathing mode, nothing we could see in the telemetry, of course - it'd have been nice to get
the hardware back for a hands-on."

"I think you'd better get your goggles in place now, Mr. Kelly," said the Air Force officer, sliding his own
protective eyewear into place. The functional thermoplastic communications helmets looked even sillier
atop dress uniforms than they did over the civilian clothes Desmond, and Kelly himself, wore. "For
safety's sake, you know."

Kelly was anchored to a roof strap with his left hand by habit that freed his right for the rifle he did not
carry here, not on this mission or in this world where 'cut-throat' meant somebody might lose a job or a
contract. ... He looked at the PR flacks, missing part of what Desmond was saying because his mind was
on things that were not the job of the Special Assistant to Representative Bianci.

The colonels straightened, one of them with a grimace of repulsion, and neither of them tried again to
break in as the project scientist continued, " - plating by the aluminum oxide particles we inject with the
on-board hydrogen to provide detonation nuclei during that portion of the pulsejet phase. Chui-lin insists
the plasma itself scavenges the chambers and that the fault must be the multilayer mirrors themselves
despite the sapphire coating."

"But there's just as much likelihood of blast damage when you're expelling atmosphere as when you're
running on internal fuel, isn't there?" said Kelly, who had done his homework on this one as he did on any
task set him by Representative Bianci; and as he had done in the past, when others tasked him.