"Continuing Time - 98 - Lord November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

the Church thought so. True, the Sleem had been growing restless, had more than
once recently interfered in the travel of the ChurchТs emissaries. But it was a
grand leap, to go from harassing the servants of the Church, to interfering with
the business of one of the great Cathedrals.
The Dalmastran did not think that the empire would be so foolishЧbut the Sleem
had been disturbingly arrogant of late, and the Dalmastran had been taught, by
the Zaradin themselves, to avoid confrontation over matters not involving
theology.
They studied the Solar System for several days, its scattering of planets, moons
and asteroids and comets; listened to the broadband echoes of radio and
television and InfoNet, and came to their decision.
A Missionary fell in toward the Sun.

Peter Janssen followed a Hoffman trajectory, heading down to an orbit some
125,000 kilometers above the cloudy surface of Jupiter. He was already 240,000
klicks above the clouds, and dropping; it put him well inside the orbit of all
JupiterТs satellites except Amalthea. His target was an observation buoy he had
dropped into JupiterТs atmosphere, with seven other buoys, a week past. This
buoy was the only one to successfully blast itself back up into space, and
unless Janssen snagged it on this pass, the buoy would drop helplessly back into
JupiterТs lethal atmosphere, burning up on re-entry, losing its atmospheric
samples and whatever data had not made it through via telemetry.
He had to pick up the buoy on his first pass because his margin of delta-V was
close to nonexistent. His craft, a modified Chandler BlackSmith, had heavy
radiation shielding to protect him from JupiterТs deadly and incessant radiation
storms. (That was only one of the dozens of ways that Jupiter duty was different
from the Earth-Luna runs of which Janssen, an ex-SpaceFarer, was a veteran. Bar
the odd sunstorm, cis-Lunar space is largely free of radiation hazards. Around
Earth-Luna, shielding is more a drawback than an asset. Most solar radiation
passes straight through the human body without damaging it. Moderate shielding
is actually worse than none; cascading secondary radiation from light shielding
is worse for the human body than the primary solar radiation against which it is
designed to protect.)
Because Peter JanssenТs slipship was so heavily shielded, his delta-V was
correspondingly reduced; his slipship massed half again what Chandler Industries
had intended.
He whistled tunelessly as he made final approach to the buoy. They were awaiting
him eagerly back at the settlement on GanymedeЧwell, the research scientists
were. Or rather, he corrected himself, the research scientists were eagerly
awaiting his return of their buoy.
Whatever. At least someone was looking forward to seeing him.
He was not a popular man, Peter Janssen. His own moodiness and irritability
contributed to it, he knew. While at St. PeterТs CityState, he had missed Luna;
and now that he was at Ganymede, he missed the CityState. He brooded at times
that his life in the last few years had been a series of increasingly poor
decisions, made increasingly at random. Most of those who knew him these days
had never seen him smile.
Those same people would have been surprised to see the change that had come over
him now. A grin played across his lips; his eyes drooped closed and he lay
slackly in the webbed padding of the pilotТs enclosure.