"Bc20" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry & Pournelle)

Beautiful.
"Two klicks from target," she yelled. "Keep it tight!"

Justin wheeled the skeeter around the outside of the herd and drove a stray male back to the center. The chamels traversed a long stretch of brown gravel. They changed colors wildly as the terrain changed, and from his aerial perspective it seemed the ground itself was flowing like a river. It was easier to track the herd by dust cloud than by direct observation.
Everything was right on schedule. "In position. Have visual contact with corral."
"Yippie-yi-oh-tie-yay." Jessica's voice. He knew she was grinning.

Jessica dropped her plaid bandanna across her face as she cut toward the middle of the herd. They parted for her like the Red Sea. As the trike jolted through the grass, making almost sixty klicks an hour, she could reach out to either side to touch a chamel. Damn, they were beautiful beasts! Fast, strong, agile-and intelligent. The pups darted through the herd seeking pockets of adult protection. The trike's roar blended with the steady rolling thunder of their hooves. They wheeled left to avoid a log, and she jerked her handlebars to follow.
A commotion to the right: Aaron Tragon, mounted on Zwieback, the chamel Ruth had tamed for him. They burst out of the trees just ahead of the herd.
The herd wheeled, confused for a moment . . . and then followed.
Jessica yelped her pleasure. Damn. He had been right again. Chamels were extreme olfactory sensitives. Pouches on Aaron's mount carried an overwhelming dose of chamel pheromones. Whammo-Zwieback became an instant alpha. Their herding instincts and trainability boded well. Chamels were an odd hybrid of horse and ostrich, with wide, fleshy mouths and thin, strong legs.
The trike jounced savagely as they crossed the last rise. Ahead of them was the corral, seven feet tall and a quarter kilometer around.
"All right. Let's keep it tight, keep it tight-"
It was hardly needed. The chamels followed Aaron through the open gate. Jessica turned aside at the last second and the chamels charged past her into the pen. Once inside they realized they were trapped. They snorted and tossed their heads, but there was no way out but the gate, and Chaka was already swinging that shut before Jessica could dismount and dash over to help him.
She ran up the short ramp leading to the edge of the corral.
The new twelve had joined fifty chamels captured over the previous week. The new ones snorted restlessly, but even as they did, their skin changed color, matching the beaten ground beneath their hooves.
Aaron swung off his mount, and grabbed for the ladder.
He slipped, and fell back to the ground. Jessica's fist went to her mouth. For a moment, fear locked her into immobility.
The adult chamels reared back: unmasked, Man's smell was very different from their own. Two of the adults turned their backs, and began to kick.
She had seen this behavior before. A ring of chamels to protect a pup, the heavy, hard, sharp hooves striking out over and over again. It wouldn't work against a grendel, but cameras had watched the creatures surround a bear-sized predator and literally kick it into pulp.
Aaron scrambled up to the ladder, spun as one of the hooves caught him alongside the shoulder, and leaped upward. He got two rungs up before another hoof caught him in the thigh. He grunted but kept going, and was out of range a moment later, lips curled into a satisfied smile. She could see where his jeans were dusted and cut by the striking hoof.
Chaka helped him up over the top, and he thumped down heavily. He swept Jessica up for a big, warm kiss, then gave a victory wave to the circling skeeters.
Dust fluttered about them as the skeeters touched down, and the penned chamels brayed even louder.
Jessica climbed up the ramp to look down at them. "Get along little doggies," she sang to herself. "It's your misfortune . . . "
"All right!" Justin said, slapping his hands together. She jumped, startled-he had made his approach silently. "What's left on the chart for today?"
"We've done enough work for today." Her back still ached from digging trike pits, but she had to love him. What an eager beaver. It was getting easier to relate to Justin. The bad times, at least the really bad ones, seemed behind them.
"I think we've got time to lay for the spider devils. What do you say?"
She peered up into the sky. Tau Ceti was still bright and high. "We've got five hours of daylight. Have a spot in mind?"
Chaka raised a huge finger. "How 'bout the heavy patch, about two klicks from where we trapped the chamels?"
"Some folks would say we were too close to water," Justin reminded him.
Jessica laughed. "Older folks. I'd bet."
"Yup."
Chaka waved nonchalantly. "We'll use motion sensors and a backup team. Thermal, if you want them, Justin."
"Well . . . the spider devils seem to like the area. Grendels would eat them if they could catch them." He pitched a rock off across the horizon. "I guess we can handle it."
Jessica slapped him on the back. That's my unbrother. "Sounds like a plan."

As Justin and Jessica ate lunch a pair of skeeters rose and swept away toward the east. Another came in with a load of chamel chow.
"Quite an operation," he said.
The fences were already sealed again. Unlike the main camp, here there were no passive boundaries-but they did have an electrified fence, twenty-four-hour guards, movement sensors, and a fortified, grendel-proof shelter.
The shelter was Quonset-hut-shaped, and certified grendel-proof by Colonel Cadmann Weyland. Jessica felt an odd mixture of security and disgust when she remembered the way he had tested the crystal-filament-reinforced plastic constructions . . .

Memory: Blackship Island was gray and rocky, just a spur, really. It held one of the relay stations constructed between Camelot and the mainland. A skeeter pad. Emergency supplies. A stormproof shelter.
The waves shot foam high into the air where they slapped up against the rocks that day. Jessica looked up at her father where he sat beside her. His face seemed as gray as the rock, as gray as the sky.
They had said little to each other since the day she planted the disrupter in his home. The day she had betrayed their relationship.
Two skeeters flew in from the north, their flight patterns carefully timed and synchronized, one flown by Evan Castaneda and the other by Aaron. Cargo hoists with specimen slings hung beneath each skeeter.
Jessica's heartbeat accelerated at the thought of what was about to happen.
Cadmann spoke casually. "Let's have Skeeter Seven first." Aaron's craft hovered overhead, and wenched down its load.
Eleven feet of fang and gray scales and claws and spiked tail lay in that sling. A grendel. Type 6 was the color of gray mud; otherwise not very different from the now extinct Camelot grendels, but with a down-turned double hook at the tail . . . and a solemn, brooding mouth, where holos of the Camelot horrors showed a demon's grin. Chaka strode up to it, hunkered down, and peered into its eyes.
They were open, staring, sightless.
Or were they? Could anyone really say what was happening in the depths of its quasi-reptilian mind? They knew enough to be certain that a few volts of electricity trickling through its sleep centers would keep it quiescent.