"Kay Kenyon -The Seeds of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenyon Kay)

high and bell-like. God, was that her laugh? Damn well better be. Don't get spooked now, girl. You got a
job to do.
The numbers slipped by the face of the chronometer, counting the years, the thousands, the hundreds of
thousands, until time was meaningless, too enormous to matter, to count. There in the blackness of
interstellar space, moving back in time meant less about time than it did about space. The solar system, the
whole galaxy, was rushing headlong through the universe, while at the same time the galaxy was rotating
around its own center. Going back in time, you found yourself surrounded by the stars that had preceded
Sol on its swing through the galaxy. Travel to the stars achieved without faster-than-light speed, a simple
backdoor approach called time travel. Humanity's only bridge across the monstrous distances of space. A
limited bridge, but better than nothing. Vandarthanan's mathematical vision of the mechanics of time had
opened up space travel without the need for the speedтАФor near speedтАФof light.
A Dive ship was needed. Both a spacecraft and a time-travel device. Send it out far from Earth to
avoid paradox risks. Send it back in time, not forward in timeтАФat least not past the Future Ceiling, that
current date you left on Vanda. But back in time, in search of an Earthlike planet, one that had once swung
by on its immense sweep along the Orion arm of the galaxy. Sometimes Clio thought of it as a
merry-go-round, where those rearing horses, nostrils flaring, plunged ahead of her, but only a moment
before occupied the very point on the circle, the very point where she and her red-saddled mare now
thundered by. Space was like that, a little. Galaxy, solar systems, planets, all thundering by in a headlong,
circling rush to nowhere. And with Dive, humanity could hold on and ride...
With only a few flaws.
Like the Future Ceiling, forbidding all trespass. Like Dive pilot burnout, where you push a Dive pilot
past certain tolerances and neurons burn out, flaring incandescent, leaving your highly trained pilot a few
bricks short of a full load. Took twenty-five to thirty Dives, or thereabouts. Then the companies brought in
your replacement. Hey, show the fellow around, will you?
She leaned back in her chair, breathing deeply, remembering where she was: Starhawk, Starhawk,
hawk of the stars, circling, circling, watching for its prey....
Clio jerked up in her chair. She had dozed off. Gods! She had lost it this time, gone over the edge, gone
under with the rest of the crew. Jolted awake by the dimension swing. They were stopped dead in space,
the chronometer reading steady.
Jesus, how long had they been sitting here, everybody blacked out, no one in charge... She punched in
visual, scanning the telemetry: and there was a planetтАФno, a moon. Crippen's moon, by God. Practically a
bull's-eye in Dive terms and damn lucky they didn't hit it. Even considering their hopes to get close on the
reasonably short Dive, this one was definitely snug on the mark.
Then a shattering Klaxon alarm sounded as a massive object loomed into view, headed directly toward
Starhawk.
An asteroid, caught in the moon's faint gravity, same as the ship herself. They were about to get
acquainted, real fast Clio hit the thrusters, swinging the ship around, and punched up the engines to full,
moving Starhawk out of the path, but not before the blast from the ship's jets hit the icy asteroid surface
and kicked up a rushing plume of water vapor. The eruption hit the ship, sending a shudder through the
cabin. She heard the wrenching of metal down amidships, and then they were plunging toward the large
moon itself.
As Clio struggled to bring the ship under control, she heard a groan from Captain Russo, always the
first to recover from Dive, men her angry command, "Bring the helm over to Teeg!"
"Teeg's still out, Captain. I'm working his tumbleтАФ" Starhawk was tumbling headlong toward Crippen's
moon, five rotations a second. Clio fought the controls, her hands flying over the board, slowing the tumble,
but still they were headed dead-on for the moon, out of control. Voices were screaming over the comm, but
Clio rode the ship, shutting them out. Gotta ride this pony, goddamn it, gotta ride it...
Then she got the nose of the ship up, and they were skimming across the horizon of Crippen's moon,
tugged at by the thin gravity, but breaking away in a mad rush for space.
Clio moved them well off from the asteroid, scanned the visual display one more time, saw that they