"Bc01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry & Pournelle)

With gut wrenching speed Skeeter VI rose two hundred feet above the house and hovered. From this perspective, Cadmann Weyland's ranch was a miracle of human effort. Rows of soybeans and corn and alfalfa checkered the bluff, and pens for pigs and goats and the small, furry Avalon native marsupials called "Joeys."
Beneath them, the Amazon sparkled in a silvered ribbon, just catching the morning sun. Alongside it raced a stream of children who laughed and urged one another to greater effort. Justin was well in the lead.
"Can you see it?" Evan yelled above the turbine whine.
The sunlight glinted off the stream. She thought she caught a slender shadow, but . . .
"Not yet."
"Try these." Coleen handed her a comm-link optical set: binoculars with cameras linked to the colony's central computer system. "Cassandra. I'm turning the war specs over to Jessica."
"Ready, Jessica," the computer responded.
She slipped on the war specs--they looked and felt like heavy sunglasses--and was rewarded by an enhanced version of Cassandra's camera-eye perspective. She adjusted it so the right lens was transparent, and the left gave her the comm-link image.
She squinted her right eye.
Yesss . . .there be the dragon. Shimmering in the fluorescent reds and blues of the thermal enhancement, the eel struggled its way upstream. "Cassandra, display best size data."
Length: 647 cm.
Estimated weight: 27 kg.
Cassandra gave them a glowing wiggling eel track.
Jessica whispered "Enlarge." The eel stopped, then wiggled forward and back. It expanded to fill her field of vision.
"Who sounded the alarm?"
"Little Chaka or his old man," Coleen said. "One of the Mubutus picked up the river alert. Nothing this big, not ever."
Not for the twenty years we've been here, and not for--She thought about the implications. When humans arrived, the island of Camelot had an incredibly simple ecology, samlon and green slime in the rivers, Joeys and pterodons in the high mountains, and a few thorny or poisonous plants scattered about the plains. Grendels had eaten everything else. But how long had it been that way? "You know what this means? The grendels didn't own this island for thousands of years. They couldn't, the eels wouldn't keep coming back--"
"Sure about that?"
"No, but it's something to think about. Don't lose it!"
"I'll give you another," Coleen said. "What triggered the return after all these years?"
"Now, that is one interesting question."
The tumbled granite majesty of Mucking Great Mountain rose up to greet them. The peaks were constantly swathed in fog. A few irritated pterodons swooped out of their nests to investigate Skeeter VI. Humans didn't hunt pterodons. Over the two decades that humanity had infested Avalon, the great leathery creatures had lost all fear, and now considered the skeeters worthy only of derision. The autogyros were fast but clumsy, barely capable of beating a pterodon on the straightaway, and zero competition at aerobatics.
The eel continued to labor upstream. It humped painfully through the shallows, fighting as urgently as any Earth salmon ever did.
Salmon.
Samlon.
Jessica repressed a shudder.
This thing was almost certainly a carnivore--but would confine its hunting to water. It might be as dangerous as a moray eel, fully capable of taking a baseball-sized lump out of an unwary buttock, but it shouldn't be able to do anything else. It couldn't come out of the water.
Still . . . "If it had speed it would have used it by now," Jessica dictated. "Cassandra, database search, match that image."
"No exact match. One similar life-form, two hundred ninety centimeters in length, observed in a stream on Black Ship Island." A map flashed momentarily in her vision: Black Ship Island was a smaller uninhabited island off the mainland coast.
"Evidence of speed?" she asked.
"None," Cassandra replied. "No visible speed sacs, no structures evolved for cooling. Probability low to nil."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
Every skeeter carried a fully armed shock rifle, one of the tools developed in case the grendels ever came back. They never had, but everyone was trained to use the weapons anyway. Shock rifles could deliver numerous designer loads: chiefly a capacitor dart to stun, and an engineered biotoxin which triggered overload of its "speed" sacks. Speed was the superoxygenated hemoglobin that allowed the grendels to accelerate to over 110 km/hr in about three seconds. The toxin drove a grendel completely berserk, drunken on her own "adrenaline." A speed-drunken grendel produced enough heat to cook itself in about seventy seconds.
Evan tapped his ear. "Roger."
"What's the word?" Coleen shouted.
"Kill it. Standing Municipal Order One-four-two. On file. Kill it first, decide whether it's harmful later."
"It's got no legs," Jessica said. "It can barely function on the land. Cassandra says it doesn't use speed. Let's wait."
"Got my orders," Evan said ruefully.
"Is Skeeter Six still set up for dolphin transport?"
"Sure--we flew Quanda and Hipshot up yesterday."
"Great. Somebody was playing with a Ouija board."
The eel struggled up and up, blindly urgent, making surprisingly good time. Justin had kept up with it, although many of the children had dropped back by now. She patched herself through to Justin's comm link.
"Jessie here. What does it look like to you?"
"Ugly thing. Ignoring us, though. What's the word?"
"Kill it."
"What do you think?"
"Let's take it alive."
"I like the way you think. Zack's got ice on his mind."
There was a crackle of static and another voice came online. It was Zack Moskowitz, governor of Avalon. "I find that tasteless, young man. You listen to me, both of you--your father has standing orders--"