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

"Exactly, exactly," Desmond agreed, chopping his head. "Just a time factor, says Chui-lin, but there's no
sign of overheating until we switch modes, and I don't think dropping the grain size as we've done will be
-"

"Fifteen seconds," boomed a voice from the control center on the ground, and this time Kelly and the
scientist did slide the goggles down over their eyes. The cameraman hunched behind the long shroud of
his viewing screen. A guidance mechanism as sophisticated as anything in the latest generation of
air-to-air missiles should center the lens on the test vehicle, despite any maneuvers the target or the
helicopter itself carried out. Machinery could fail, however, and the backup cameraman was determined
that he would not fail - because he was good, not because he was worried about his next efficiency
report.

The monocle ferry was a disk only eighteen feet in diameter, and at its present slant distance of almost
half a mile from the helicopters it would have been easy to ignore were it not so nearly alone on a barren
yellow landscape. With Vandenburg and Cape Canaveral irrevocably surrendered to the US Space
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Command when it was formed in 1971, the Army and Air Force had chosen Fort Bliss as the site for
their joint attempt to circumvent their new rival's control of space weaponry.

Not only was the huge military reservation empty enough to make a catastrophic failure harmless, but its
historical background as the center of Army Air Defense Training lent a slight color to the services' claim
that they were not trying to develop a 'space weapon' of their own in competition with the Space
Command.

Not that that would help them if Carlo Bianci decided the program should be axed. The congressman
from the Sixth District of Georgia had made a career - a religion, some critics claimed - of space defense,
and it wasn't the sort of thing he permitted interservice squabbling to screw up.

"Now, there may be a critical limit to grain size," Dr. Desmond was saying, "below which none of the
aluminum will form hot-spots on the mirror surface, but at these energy levels it won't take more than a
few molecules to - "

"Go," said the control center, and the landscape changed in intensity.

The beams from the six chemical laser lift stations in orbit above the launch site 'were in the near infrared
at a wavelength of 1.8 microns. Not only was light of that frequency invisible to the human eye, it was
absorbed by the cornea instead of being focused by the lens to the potential injury of the retina. The
wavelength was a relalively inefficient one for transmitting power, especially through an atmosphere which
would have passed a much higher percentage of the ultraviolet. The five megajoules of energy involved in
the test, however, meant that even the least amount of reflection raised an unacceptable risk of blindness
and worse if the operation were in the visible spectrum or shorter.

"Go-o-o ..." whispered Desmond, probably unaware that he had spoken aloud. Tom Kelly leaned
outward, bringing his shoulder and helmet into the dry, twenty-knot airstream.

The six-ton saucer quivered as it drank laser energy through the dozen windows of segmented corundum