"Alexander Jablokov - Deep Drive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

of the team hung aboard a narrow monocrystal hull with retrofitted drive pods. The crash cocoons had
been ripped from an old Earth-Luna shuttle and still bore the smiling flower logos of the rebuild company.
Soph noticed that each rubbery logo was carefully placed to conceal stress creases in the cocoon frame.
Kammer and Kun loved saving money.
The flattening globe of Venus appeared below her lug-soled boots. Soph had seen ancient images of the
planet when it had looked like a fuzzy ball bearing, covered with sulfuric acid clouds. Now vivid green
lowlands surrounded pewter seas. Craters from the comets dropped by the alien Probe Builders
pockmarked the plains. When the oceans finally filled, the planet would have two major continents:
Aphrodite, a long landmass the size of Africa, along the equator; and Ishtar, the size of Australia, hanging
off the north pole like a slipped toupee.

Their mission goal lay in the foothills of the Maxwell Mountains, which rose steeply in central Ishtar.
There, a heavily fortified and protected alien named Ripi had made a deal for an extraction. Ripi had
been a guest/prisoner of the Venusian government for eighteen years. He was the only representative of
his species within the Solar System. The bored corruption of some of his low-level jailers had allowed
DEEPDRIVE 3

him to make contact. It was worth a lot of risk to try to get him out.

The Argent had beaten them to the profitable pickup. But her captain, Tiber, had, for some unknown
reason, descended to the Venusian surface aloneтАФand disappeared. Since Tiber was the only one
aboard his vessel who had communicated with Ripi, the Argent was stuck. The crew had apparently
then sent the second atmospheric shuttle down directly to Ripi's covert, but that effort had failed as well.
Ripi remained on the surface.

The terminator lay near Ripi's covert now. The fuzzy strip of extended sunset rippled over the high peaks
of the Maxwells. The Venusian longnight was just falling there, which meant that Kammer and Kun's
team would have almost two months of darkness in which to operate. Soph hoped for a quick in and
snatch, but, clearly, things didn't always work out as planned.

Just inside the line of night, a few hundred kilometers south of Ripi, glowed Golgot, Venus's largest city,
at what would someday be Ishtar's southern coast.

Kun peered at a coordination display that linked him with the other two penetration craft, one Kammer's
and one piloted by a woman named Mura, and shook his head. He was young and had long eyelashes,
as if to compensate for the lack of hair.

A whistling seemed to come from everywhere, even the inside or Soph's own skull, as the dust tore
viciously at the hull's ablative shielding. That had been an expense Kammer and Kun had tried to avoid.
But Soph had insisted on it as a requirement for her participation. A circum-Lunar orbital yard had
sprayed it on at a good price. Its erosion would absorb the kinetic energy of the impacting dust. It was a
means of survival as old as space travel.

"We'll be all right, Kun," she said. "We have redundancy."

"Sure," he said. "No question. Redundancy." The word did not seem to give him comfort. He swallowed.
"Do you ... do you suppose the Argent crew acted without Tiber? That they're trying to grab Ripi on
their own?"

"No, of course not," said Soph, who suspected exactly