"Michael McCollum - Duty, Honor, Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

the lift. He frowned, considering Shetland's warning to him. He could see cautioning an American
against taking sides. However, why talk to him about it? He was nominally neutral in the dispute. Was
his psychological profile so clear that she could read his thoughts? Was her warning merely a precaution,
or did she have hard information that he was not as disinterested as he pretended to be?

Did she know about Alicia? Stassel shuddered at the thought. How could she possibly know? He was
nearly positive that his personnel file did not list her. Could the Political Office be investigating him for
suspected disloyalty?

The lift whooshed him upward toward the station axis. The familiar, ever changing Coriolus force as he
approached the axis clamped his stomach muscles in a familiar vise. At the zero gravity axis, Stassel
kicked off and floated to the docking port at the north pole of the station and through a flexible tube to
the shuttle.

The shuttle was a standard orbit-to-orbit supply bus -- three spherical sections assembled as though they
had been skewered onto a shish-kabob sword with a hydrogen-fueled rocket at one end and the
personnel cabin at the other. The shuttle was used to transfer personnel and consumables from the
mid-Atlantic Space Station (and her mid-Pacific counterpart) to the orbiting Peace Control Satellites.

The station was in synchronous orbit 37,000 kilometers above the equator so that it hung perpetually
over thirty degrees west longitude. The Peace Control Satellites also orbited 37,000 kilometers out, but
in two separate orbits, each inclined sixty degrees from the plane of the equator and from each other.
Each satellite thus described a figure eight over a stationary strip of land, taking one day for the full
traverse across the face of the planet. The satellites climbed to the latitude of Hudson's Bay in the north
and dropped to the northern tip of Antarctica in the south. Spaced every ten degrees of longitude - or
7500 kilometers apart -- in their orbits, the satellites passed over every industrialized and developing
nation on Earth four times daily. The seventy satellites and two space stations in orbit gave the UN's
hundred gigawatt lasers overlapping fields of fire against any conceivable opponent. War was
impossible.

At least, that was the theory.

#

"How you doing, Krauthead?" Smiley Burgess, the shuttle pilot greeted him as he floated into the cabin.
Burgess spoke in a slow Texas drawl that Stassel found irritating. In fact, Burgess embodied most of the
characteristics he found objectionable in Americans.

"I am fine, Mr. Burgess," he said. He noted the six empty couches around the pilot. "Where are the rest
of your passengers?"

"You're it, Friedrich old pal." He pronounced the name "Fred-rick," completely mangling the final тАШish'
sound. "I guess the Hunwants to get someone he can trust into Alpha-Nine ASAP. I made a special trip
to Beta-Nine yesterday. Took off Powell and substituted that chink, Hsin Liu, in his place. Funny thing
about it, the flanking satellites all have Europeans, or Africans, or Asians in them. Not a single American,
north orsouth, to be seen."

Stassel nodded absently. The Hun was General Heinemann.

"Strap yourself in, boy. This is going to be the fastest change of plane maneuver you ever did see."