"Michael McCollum - Maker 2 - Procyion Promise" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

archeologists digging in the aliensтАЩ garbage dump unearthed a small strip of bright-blue plastic that turned
out to be the Star Traveler equivalent of a record cube. It was ten years before the Alphans could access
the data encoded within the strip, and another twenty before they could read it. Eventually, however, they
succeeded - the record strip turned out to be a maintenance manual for one of the abandoned starships. It
was the breakthrough the Alphans had sought so long.

It took two hundred years to go from the initial explorations of the abandoned Star Traveler spaceport to
a working FTL starship. In that time, the human population of Alpha climbed from fifty thousand to fifty
million. The vast majority of Alphans were average people with the same everyday concerns as people
anywhere/anywhen. Only a tiny minority could work at any given time on the puzzle presented by the
starship hulks. Yet, in spite of Mrs. SardiтАЩs thesis, support for the FTL project continued high from
generation to generation.

#

тАЬTwo minute warning! Prepare for breakout. T minus two minutes and counting.тАЭ

Robert Braedon took a deep breath and pulled his attention back from the utter blackness overhead. He
was a tall man whose black hair was streaked with a greater quantity of gray than his 45 years should
have warranted. Like most Alphan men, he kept his hair close-cropped and in a bowl-cut without
sideburns. His weather-beaten skin showed the effects of having been exposed to sunlight with a higher
percentage of ultraviolet in it than SolтАЩs. His dark tan, plus the muscular frame beneath his uniform,
betrayed him as an outdoorsman. His most prominent facial feature was his nose, which had been broken
in a training accident and not reset properly. His wife had always claimed that it gave him character.

Braedon stretched in the chair he had occupied nearly continuously for the last twelve hours, and leaned
forward to study his readouts. Two dozen instruments told him that his ship was operating normally. He
nodded in satisfaction. Things were going well.

тАЬOne minute to Breakout. Stand by.тАЭ The voice belonged toPromise тАЩs computer, a direct descendant of
the original SURROGATE. After a short pause, the computer spoke again. тАЬThirty seconds. Shields
going up.тАЭ

A series of wedge shaped sections rose from out of the metal hull at the perimeter of the viewdome and
quickly converged at the apex to shut off the blackness overhead. All over the ship, similar shields were
sliding into place.

Like any other vehicle,ProcyonтАЩs Promise displaced the medium through which it traveled. InPromise тАЩs
case, that meant a vacuum thin mixture of hydrogen, cosmic dust, and primitive organic molecules. Had
the ship been moving at less than superluminal velocity, its progress through the void would have been
marked only by an undetectably small warming of its hull plates as it pushed the detritus of stellar
evolution aside.

However, oncePromise cracked the light barrier, things changed markedly. At FTL velocities, each
hydrogen atom became a significant obstruction. As the ship bored its narrow tunnel through space, the
interstellar particles refused to be pushed. It was the classic case of the Irresistible Force meeting the
Immovable Object. In a situation analogous to the supersonic flight of an atmospheric craft, the
confrontation resulted in a shock wave of high energy Cherenkov radiation.
Nor wasPromise тАЩs wake the friendly upwelling that follows any watercraft. It was a ravening storm
intense enough to fry an unprotected human within seconds. Yet, the very speed that created the