"mayflies07" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

"Huh?"
"Look-we're penetrating above the plane of the ecliptic, but with a few course changes and fly-by, we can drop into it. There's an asteroid belt. I can scoop up material-come to think of it, I could do that after I've dropped you off-no, better before. I scoop it up, and once we're in orbit, I fashion it into the housing my hull would have provided. How's that?"
They wrangle for a while-a long while; some will be hitching about it years after I've gone-but a few sly remarks to the effect that the material will be a millennium younger, and presumably less subject to metal fatigue, carry the day. They agree. Kinney signals the invaders to disperse. I dispatch servos to collect stun-poles, promising to return them when the Landers go down. (And meanwhile getting to work on a design immune to electroshock.) Together we work out the course changes that will swoop us through the asteroid belt on a mining trip.
And a nerve-shattering jaunt it is-while the belt isn't as crowded as the Santa Monica Freeway used to be, the kinetic energies involved are significantly higher . . . even though I'm decelerating, and the ramscoop (which gathers both fuel for the engines and small asteroids for the settlement) clears out the area immediately ahead, new rocks whistle in from the sides. I am too big to be agile. My eyes and ears strain to their outer limits to detect incoming traffic. Virtually all my time is devoted to constant recomputations of my flight path . . . stop, start, reverse engines; swivel, quick! Long blast, short burp, fusion furious about menacing meteroids, pinholed! Servos slap seals on bulkheads; Landers chew fingernails completely off (wish I had some; could nibble a few right now). Jolt! Jounce! Spin . . . and we're out of the danger zone, with two hundred million tons of rock in the hold.
We orbit Canopus XXIV for six months before the probes tell us its atmosphere is safe, its native microbiota too different to be dangerous, and its dry lands apparently uninhabited by intelligence. While the explorations continue, I smelt the metallic harvest into modular housing with ablative bases.
At last Ivan Kinney decides to go down. I shut off the g-units to provide 0-G. The core hatch on 321-2 North ratchets into the bulkhead; pressurized oxygen spurts the landing craft along the 321-2 North Service Corridor. It stops between the two airlocks; 120 gamblers-some eager, some scared silly-climb into it. The outer hatch cycles open; another gust of oxygen thrusts the aluminum needle into space, where it orients itself and spreads its wings.
"Sure you know how to fly that, Ivan?" I radio.
"Spent twenty years on the trainers," he flashes back. "If I'm not onto it by now, I never will be."
75,000 pairs of eyes burn through the portholes to watch the long, thin vessel head toward the penumbra, and dip into the night side. A great sigh goes up as it is lost to sight, but the radars show their sightings on the display screens. The vigil continues. The air grows smoky. Muscles everywhere tense as the telemetered altimetry readings melt into single digits. I open the speech circuits and we all hear:
"We're down!" Kinney's voice is almost overwhelmed by shouting, cheering, and piercing wolf whistles.
"What's it look like?" I query.
"Flat. Some kind of plant life, similar to grass, all around us, stretching to the far horizon . . . which is jagged, serrate; must be mountains . . . Jesus, it feels funny to be here . . . the ground is hard, we're going to go out and take a look . . . goddamn, I just can't believe we made it."
The rest of the mayflies cheer. And cheer. And cheer,

They're all down, now. 68,912 of them. 575 landing crafts' worth; I only have 77 left. They dropped one at a time, and their flights were interspersed with supply drops. Eighteen months, so far, and there's a lot left to do.
The Travelers are helping to manufacture what the fledgling colony would have had if I'd surrendered myself. We figure another three years, maybe four . . . it would be more predictable if the parachutes didn't fail on occasion . . .

And now we're leaving, having beamed a final, farewell message to Canopus Colony that was heard by a couple radio operators, a handful of tape recorders, and Sangria. They're busy down there; they don't have time for sentimental good-byes.
The eyes up here are dry, too, even though six thousand eight Travelers' noses are flattened against the portholes as Canopus XXIV recedes. They've gotten used to its presence, to the large, warm solidarity of it-it'll be a while before they see its like again.
The colonists won't miss us. They've got their four moons, which kept us from competing for their attention at night. They've got their housing and machinery, more of it than they can use, so they should be psychologically prepared for our absence. They've also got Sangria the F-puter, who has a duplicate of everything in my banks.
So it's off to the asteroid belt again, where we'll reap enough ore to fashion 100,000 FTL engines and replenish our depleted resources. From there . . . we haven't laid a course, yet.
But I know one thing.
I'm going to go talk to some aliens.