"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Fallen Angels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Don't piss off your rescuers. But Lonny would never take someone like
Mike aboard. Whatever Mike's intellect and training, he was just too damn
big. It would take too many resources to fuel that much mass.
They're not corning down for us anyway. We are here for keeps, and
Mike is a hell of a lot better adapted to local conditions than I am. "Where
to now?" he asked.
 Your grandparents sound like good folks.
"They are. Gran was a plant geneticist before they outlawed it. PopтАФ
pop was a farmer. They still do a little bootleg bioengineering in their
basement. Developed a cold-resistant strain of wheat that let them bring in
a crop for three years after their neighbors went under. They had to stop
last year, though. Gran seeded a rust virus that killed off their crop."
"What? Why? If they'd continued-тАФSherrine, it's going to get a lot
colder before it ever gets warmer."
She looked away; beat her mittens together. "Hungrier, too." Her voice
was hard and angry. "But their neighbors-тАФtheir good, kindly,
salt-of-the-earth neighbors were starting to talk about witchcraft. They
couldn't imagine any other reason why my grandparents' wheat thrived
while theirs died. Peasants always believe in witchcraft." She seated herself
on the snowmobile attached to his sledge. Her back was turned and he
could not see her face.
Bruce Hyde, code-named "Robert," planted himself behind the other
sledge. "Everybody ready?" he asked. Doc Waxman took the second
snowmobile. Thor and Steve Mews, the black man, were on cross-country
skis. They adjusted their sunglasses and waved. Bruce checked his Navstar
transponder and circled his arm above his head. "Warp factor five, Mr.
Sulu!"
The snowmobiles started with a roar. Searchers might find us hard to
see, Alex thought, but we sure as hell would be easy to hear.
And, dammit, they would stick out for sure on an IR screen. Eight
warm-bodied needles in a very cold haystack. And the two snowmobile
engines would glow like spotlights.
Alex tried to scan the skies for search planes, but found himself oddly
disoriented. The sky was white and the ground was white, and it was hard
to tell which was which. "White-out," Mike had called it. "Sky" was
"forward," the direction along the acceleration vector. Yet, the visual
cues-тАФthe ice sliding past the sledge-тАФwere at right angles to his sense of
 Sherrine nodded. None of them wanted to talk. It was too cold.
He tongued his uplink. "Big Momma, this is Piranha." More hiss and
crackle. "Big Momma, this is Piranha." Sherrine looked the question at him.
He shook his head. "Big Momma, this is Piranha."
"Piranha, da. Eto Mir. We relay you. Please to be standink by."
He waited. Freedom would be below the horizon. Fortunately, there was
always something in the sky. The RCA communications satellites, capable
of relaying half the long-distance calls of the world, only the world didn't
want them anymore. Now this splendid system, capable of thousands of
simultaneous calls, served the space stations and the few people on Earth
who wanted to talk to them.
"Alex, this is Mary. What is it?" Alex thought she sounded tired, and
who could blame her? She had been standing by in Mission Control ever