"GRAF, L. A - STAR TREK ROUGH TRAILS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Graf L A)

the chief engineer had spent the last few weeks out at the spaceport as
Sulu ran his shuttle through its paces. "Any reply from it should get
bounced and amplified by the atmospheric boundary layer exactly the
same way mine did on the way to him. That means it will arrive right
back here."

Barrels lifted an eyebrow at her over his steaming mug of tea. "Even
if his Bean is jumping really fast at the time?"

It was a measure of Uhura's stress level that the nickname the
irreverent Llano Verde colonists had given Sulu and Scotty's
antigravity vertical flight vessel could no longer spark even a flicker
of amusement. "that's why I'm using a range of simulcast frequencies "
she said, rubbing at the frown lines that seemed to have engraved
themselves permanently into her forehead. "I tried to stuff in as much
bandwidth as the system could handle without getting any negative inter
rerence on the collier wave. I'm not sure it's really enough to
compensate for Sulu's movement over an extended broadcast, but if he
lets me reply every so often-" "Assuming he ever hears you."

Uhura winced. The disadvantage of chatting with fellow technical
specialists was their clear-eyed grasp of the crux of a problem. She
knew exactly how to extrapolate reflectance angles to all parts of the
subcontinent once she had a minimum set of established values, and
she'd even figured out how to correct the system for daily
meteorological variation of the boundary layer. But she still had no
answer for the fundamental question of why Sulu had never, not even
once, heard any of her experimental hails.

"Have you talked to the weather people lately?" she asked. It wasn't
an attempt to change the subject, although Bartels's puzzled look told
her he hadn't followed her train of thought. Llano Verde had gotten
its name from its previously lush semitropical climate. At some point,
those Burn-disrupted rains were going to return, washing the olivium
dust out of the atmosphere for a while and making the need for Uhura
and Rand's new communications systems much less urgent. "When are they
predicting the dust season will end?"

The technical officer sighed and drained the rest of his tea. "Depends
on who you ask"' he said. "The computer modelers think we'll get
spring monsoons in the next month or two, but the hydrologists keep
saying they don't have the field data to support it." He ran a hand
along the top of her console, brushing off dust and shaking his head
ruefully. "I'm not sure how rumors spread so fast through the Outland
without any real communications system, but I've already got half the
continent begging me for flood-control dams while the other half is
yelling for irrigation channels."

Uhura's tea suddenly tasted acrid on her tongue, as if her taste buds
had just noticed how foreign those native spices were. She swallowed