"The Clouds Of Saturn" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

success.
Like all members of the council, Dalishaar believed in the AllianceТs manifest
destiny to one day rule Saturn. Still, he found the MilitaristsТ impatience to
be childish. DidnТt the fools understand that there were other ways to
unification than conquest? Given time, the Delphis could have been made to see
the advantages of peaceful assimilation. Moreover, if they had remained
reluctant, there were still economic and political pressures that could have
been brought to bear. As it was, the Militants had gotten their way and thereby
put every independent city on Saturn on their guard. This was an especially bad
time to remind them that they had an expansionist power in their midst.
If only the damned admirals had waited until...
Dalishaar clamped down on the thought as quickly as it flowed into his brain.
The admirals were ignorant of his special project and he intended to keep them
that way. They would learn nothing until he had consolidated his own position
and fought back this latest danger to his personal power. So careful was he
about keeping the secret that he did not even allow himself to think about it.
That way he would be less likely to whisper something in his sleep. Not only did
an occasional eavesdropping device turn up in his apartments, at least one of
his mistresses was in the pay of the Militarists.

Chapter 3: Kimber

Port Gregson was a typical Saturnian cloud city. Lift was provided by heated
hydrogen trapped inside a ten-kilometer diameter gasbag. A light support truss
stretched across the gasbag at its equator and was attached to the ultra-strong
membrane around its periphery. The support truss was the structural base to
which the cityТs buildings were anchored. A fusion powerplant was suspended ten
kilometers below the city proper where it hung like the basket of an ancient
terrestrial balloon. The powerplant provided the energy to heat the hydrogen
inside the gasbag and produce the buoyancy that kept Port Gregson and its
inhabitants aloft in the clouds.
From above, Port Gregson looked like an earthbound city of an earlier century.
Imposing (but lightweight) edifices were interspersed between wide thoroughfares
and greenswards. Only when one approached the city from below was it obvious
that its habitable volume extended throughout the open framework of the truss.
Not only were structures built atop the deck that covered the truss, they were
buried within its volume and suspended by cables from its lowest levels. Around
the truss edges were a series of portals through which aircraft entered and left
the city. Also buried inside the support truss were the giant maneuvering
engines that allowed Port Gregson to tack back and forth across the flyway.
A few hundred meters above the upper deck, a transparent membrane covered the
city. This was the habitat barrier inside which the city engineer maintained a
breathable mixture of oxygen and helium. Since both the habitat barrier and the
gasbag were transparent, inhabitants strolling through the cityТs parks had the
illusion of being outdoors beneath SaturnТs rich blue sky.
Like the other cloud cities, Port Gregson hovered at the 500-kilometer depth in
SaturnТs atmosphere. At that level, the temperature remained near the freezing
point of water. Atmospheric pressure was ten times what had existed at Earth
mean sea level before the sun flared, but SaturnТs low-density hydrogen-helium
atmosphere robbed the wind of much of its force. This combination of high