"Jerry Oltion - Biosphere" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

Biosphere (v1.1)

Jerry Oltion


The autopilot brought the lander in fast, braking hard over the tiny clearing in the forest
and setting down before the fusion flame could set the trees on fire. That didn't seem like a
big danger -- it was raining like a waterfall out there -- but Darran figured the first person to
visit a planet that might be inhabited should be careful not to cause any more damage than
necessary.
The computer said, "Contact," and a moment later the automatic levelers adjusted the floor
angle. Darran shut off the drive and spoke into his pressure suit mike.
"I'm down. View out the port is very bright and green. The glass is too ripply with rain
water to see much detail, but tell Boglietti his planet's chartreuse."
Richard Boglietti had discovered the planet while the Pioneer was still half a light-year out
from Altair, but he wasn't the explorer type. He was an astronomer; the overall system held
more interest for him than did the planet itself. The starship's two other crewmembers were
excited enough, but they were both in the infirmary with a virus they'd gotten from one of the
passengers coming out of hibernation, and none of the sleepers would be ready for duty for
over a week. It fell to Darran, who had been born twenty-two years ago en route from the
Sirius colony and had never before set foot on anything not manmade, to speak the first
words from the surface. And to find out why there were no cities or obvious signs of
habitation despite a constant low-level microwave hum that came from practically
everywhere.
He tried not think too much about the responsibility he'd been given. It would probably
come to nothing anyway. Nobody had answered their radio signals; the microwaves probably
came from a natural source.
He closed his suit visor. "I'm buttoning up to go out -- "
"Warning," said the computer. "External cooling air pumps one and two have failed."
Darran looked to the control panel for confirmation, saw two red lights blinking there. Then
another one. He looked at the label just as the computer spoke again. "Main engine fuel line
failure."
Was he under attack? But the external sensors registered no motion outside. Besides, the
air pumps and fuel line were inside the hull; they would be impossible to hit without taking half
a dozen other subsystems with them. It had to be a spontaneous failure, even though the
lander had worked fine all the way down through the thick atmosphere.
But that was just the beginning. A wave of warning lights swept across the board, starting
in the drive section and working steadily across the attitude control jets and external sensors,
then blinking on in the environmental section and power supply. The computer's alarm voice
couldn't keep up with it.
"Computer, shut up," Darran told it. "I've got a cascade failure of some sort," he said for
the benefit of the people in orbit. He was proud of how calm he sounded. It had to be an
instrumentation problem; that many separate systems couldn't fail at once.
Then he felt a thump from beneath the deck and heard the screech of metal giving way
under too much stress, and he decided maybe they could.
The computer broke silence to say, "Situation critical. Eject now," but he was already
shouting, "Eject, eject!" If the control board could be believed, the fuel tank had just
ruptured.
He felt a hard jolt, and the instruments went dead. Either the tank had blown and he would
be dead in a millisecond or two himself, or ...