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

thought of that war as a futile riot against the alien species that had settled the System, from Gunners on
Mercury and the B garth on Venus to Cruthans in the Titanian atmosphere. Stephan had seen it as a flare
of romance in a grim, dark world.

There had even been fighting just off Earth itself, among the circum-Lunar asteroids of the Diadem. Those
carefully neutral Lunarians who wished, watched the flare of Martian and Terran reaction drives through
automated telescopes, and took bets. Soph had never wished.

After the war, Stephan had become a sporting guide on
┬лM DEEPDRIVE 7
lo, which, despite its inhospitable surface, had been a site of major fighting during the war. lo, the
innermost large moon of Jupiter, was the most volcanically active body in the System. Its thin crust flexed
dramatically under the gravitational pulls of Jupiter and Europa, the nearest of the other large satellites.
Tidal friction kept a vast sea of sulfur and sulfur dioxide molten, ready to blast through the silicate crust.
Volcanic plumes rose hundreds of kilometers above the surface. Continental floods of liquid silicate and
sulfur poured across the torn surface, then seeped back down through the crust to the molten interior.

Uninhabitable by any of the alien species in the System, lo became a gigantic, dangerous playground after
the war, with insulated swimmers chasing each other through bubbling pools of sulfur, gliders mounting
almost to escape velocity on erupting volcanic plumes, surfers on breaking waves of rock.

It was there that Stephan had died, atop a volcanic eruption. The bloated face of Jupiter had stared
down at him through the roiled atmosphere. Both his parents secretly wondered what he had seen there
in those last moments. Somehow neither doubted that some revelation had come as he flew, arms
outstretched, into the flaming sky.

Lightfoot sighed. "So you insist on going on this treasure hunt to Venus?"

"How often do I have to say it?"

"Once more, I think."

' 'Just once?'' It was an old game, and she played it without thinking.

"Yes. The repetitions seem to be adding up."

"They are. I'm going, Lightfoot."

Once out of the dust cloud, they skipped down through the atmosphere over the Guinevere Sea, to the
south of the future continent of Ishtar, and made their rendezvous. The landing craft now nestled into the
underside of a hundred-meter-long biopackage built by the alien B garth, supported four thou-
8 Alexander Jablokov

sand meters above the surface by vast airfoils filled with buoyant hydrogen, driven by biomechanical
turbojets.

The Bgarth had landed only a few decades after the mysterious Probe, with its escort of ice comets, had
begun the great transformation of Venus. The Bgarth accelerated the planet's human-habitability
bootstrap by their presence beneath the crust and by complex biological packages like this one, intended
for the continuing ecological growth of northern Ishtar.