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

4 Alexander Jablokov

that. Otherwise, they would have sent that second shuttle down to recover Tiber, instead of trying for
Ripi directly. God, she hated it when Lightfoot' s warnings were borne out. She so wanted him to be
wrong.
"Yeah," Kun said. "We'll get Ripi out."

"We will."

Soph rested back and felt her luggage rearrange itself to support her lower back. Its internal linkages, she
hoped, would make up for any insufficiencies in the cocoon. The ship shook harder. A soft bag cupped
the back of her head as the planet swelled.

Sophonisba Trost was a small woman, with a stocky, efficient body, sly black eyes, and a flat nose. She
was some years older than fifty. She wore her still-black hair in a helmet, and her face crinkled all over
when she laughed. She had always feared that she looked like a monkey.

She was slightly disappointed by the rising thunder as the ship made it past the last swirls of the inner dust
clouds and entered Venus's stratosphere, and she blew a breath out between her lips. When they last
talked, in his house on Luna, Lightfoot had told her to turn this mission down. It was suicide, he'd said.
What he didn't understand was that that was one of its main attractions.

A broken dining room table tilted in the middle of the dimly lit storeroom like a sinking ship. Damaged
decorative panels of synthetic stone from other parts of the vast house dripped with condensation.

"Ripi." Lightfoot wore a white shirt with a high collar, tailored to minimize his belly. "The Venusians
haven't gotten anything from Ripi in the eighteen years since he blew into the System from Outside and
crashed in the Ishtar back country. I'm sure he thought he was lucky to live through it, at the time. They
stuffed him into that place they call his covert and haven't let him out since."

"I've done the research," Soph said. "I know the story."

"But do you understand it? That's the question."

"The question is why I even came here."
DEEPDRIVE 5

Lightfoot's creased face sagged even further: that basset hound expression he thought got him sympathy.
"I invited you," he said. "You were kind enough to accept. I just want to talk." He pushed a steaming cup
of tea at her. She caught it before it slid down the tilting tabletop.

"Lightfoot," she said, "you're not going to talk me out of it. If that's the only reason you've invited me
here, we can go right on to the house tour. I understand there's some lovely ceiling carving on the upper
floors...."

"No, no. Please."

' 'What, then?'' She calmed herself by building a teacup barrier out of toffee-colored chunks of carnelian.

"Some people used to think that Ripi entered the System with a functional deepdrive. After all, he'd come