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

which ringed its upper surface like the eyes of a monstrous insect. The central hub of the ferry contained
the one-man cockpit, empty now except for instrumentation, which did not rotate as the blast chambers
around the saucer's rim began to expel air flash-heated within them by laser pulses.

Dust, as much a part of West Texas as it was of the hills above Beirut, rippled in a huge, expanding
doughnut from the concrete pad. It formed a translucent bed for the ferry, a mirage landscape on which
the saucer seemed to rest instead of lifting as planned. Then the dust was gone, a yellow-gray curtain
across distant clumps of Spanish bayonet, and the ferry itself was a lens rather than a disk as it shot past
the helicopters circling at five hundred meters.

"All right!" blurted Kelly, jerking his eyes upward to track the monocle through the frame members and
shimmering helicopter rotors against a sky made amber by his goggles.

"Twenty-two g's!" babbled the project scientist happily. "Almost from the point of liftoff! There's no way
Space Command's ground-lift barges can match that - or any chemically-fueled launcher."

The chopper rocked between paired sonic booms, a severe one followed by an impact of lesser
intensity. The monocle ferry had gone supersonic even before it reached the altitude of the helicopters,
buffeting them with a shock wave reflected from the ground as well as the pulse streaming directly from
the vehicle's surface. The roar of the ferry's exhaust followed a moment later, attenuating rapidly like that
of an aircraft making a low-level pass.
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




"All right," Kelly repeated, disregarding the colonels, who he knew would be beaming at his enthusiasm.
There was a hell of a lot more to this 'air defense' program than the mere question of how well the
hardware worked; but hardware that did work gave Kelly a glow of satisfaction with the human race,
and he didn't give a hoot in hell about who knew it. It was their lookout if they thought he was dumb
enough to base his recommendations on that alone.

Their helicopter and the other two essed out of their slow starboard orbits, banking a little to port to
make it easier for the cameras and observers to follow an object high enough above them to be
effectively vertical. There were supposed to be chase planes, T-38 trainers with more cameras, but Kelly
could see no sign of them at the moment. The ferry itself was no more than a sunstruck bead of amber.

"Normally," Dr. Desmond explained, "we'd continue in air-breathing mode to thirty kilometers before
switching to internal fuel. For the purpose of his test, however, we'll convert to hydrogen very shortly in
order to - "

"God almighty!" cried Boardman, the Air Force flack, so far forgetting himself that he started to lurch to
his feet against the motion of the helicopter. "For the demonstration you do this?"

"We're modifying the test sequence in response to earlier results, of course," the scientist said, glancing
over at the military man.

Kelly continued to look upward, squinting by habit, though the goggles made that unnecessary.
Boardman didn't matter. He was typical of people, not necessarily stupid ones, who cling to a view of
reality against available evidence and their own presumable benefit. In this case, the public affairs officer