"Vernor Vinge - Across Realtime 1 - The Peace War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
Flashback -

One hundred kilometers below and nearly two hundred away, the shore of the
Beaufort Sea didnтАЩt look much like the common image of the arctic: Summer was far
advanced in the Northern Hemisphere, and a pale green spread across the land, shading
here and there to the darker tones of grass. Life had a tenacious hold, leaving only an
occasional peninsula or mountain range gray and bone.
Captain Allison Parker, USAF, shifted as far as the restraint harness would permit,
trying to get the best view she could over the pilotтАЩs shoulder. During the greater part of a
mission, she had a much better view than any of the тАЬtruck-drivers,тАЭ but she never tired
of looking out, and when the view was the hardest to obtain, it became the most
desirable. Angus Quiller, the pilot, leaned forward, all his attention on the retrofire
readout. Angus was a nice guy, but he didnтАЩt waste time looking out. Like many pilots -
and some mission specialists - he had accepted his environment without much continuing
wonder.
But Allison had always been the type to look out windows. When she was very young,
her father had taken her flying. She could never decide what would be the most fun: to
look out the windows at the ground-or to learn to fly. Until she was old enough to get her
own license she had settled for looking at the ground. Later she discovered that without
combat aircraft experience she would never pilot the machines that went as high as she
wanted to go. So again she had settled for a job that would let her look out the windows.
Sometimes she thought the electronics, the geography, the espionage angles of her job
were all unimportant compared to the pleasure that came from simply looking down at
the world as it really is.
тАЬMy compliments to your autopilot, Fred. That burn puts us right down the slot.тАЭ
Angus never gave Fred Torres, the command pilot, any credit. It was always the autopilot
or ground control that was responsible for anything good that happened when Fred was in
charge. Torres grunted something similarly insulting, then said to Allison, тАЬHope youтАЩre
enjoying this. ItтАЩs not often we fly this thing around the block just for a pretty girl.тАЭ
Allison grinned but didnтАЩt reply. What Fred said was true. Ordinarily a mission was
planned several weeks in advance and carried multiple tasks that kept it up for three or
four days. But this one had dragged the two-man crew off a weekend leave and stuck
them on the end of a flight that was an unscheduled quick look, just fifteen orbits and
back to Vandenberg. This was clearly a deep range, global reconnaissance - though Fred
and Angus probably knew little more. Except that the newspapers had been pretty grim
the last few weeks.
The Beaufort Sea slid out of sight to the north. The sortie craft was in an inverted,
nose-down attitude that gave some specialists a sick stomach but that just made Allison
feel she was looking at the world pass by overhead. She hoped that when the Air Force
got its permanent recon platform, she would be stationed there.
Fred Tomes - or his autopilot, depending on your point of view - slowly pitched the
orbiter through 180 degrees to bring it into entry attitude. For an instant the craft was
pointing straight down. Glacial scouring could never be an abstraction to someone who
had looked down from this height: the land was clearly scraped and grooved like ground
before a dozer blade. Tiny puddles had been left behind: hundreds of Canadian lakes, so
many that Allison could follow the sun in spectacular glints that shifted from one to
another.
They pitched still further. The southern horizon, blue and misty, fell into and then out