"Timothy Zahn - Manta's Gift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

Faraday nodded, all the data from all of the manned and unmanned probes for all of the past twenty
years flashing through his mind There was no life on Jupiter. None. Zip, zero, nada. All the books,
all the studies, all the experts agreed on that.

And all of them had ridiculed Keefer for what he'd claimed to have seen at the edge of his probe's
lights...

"No," Faraday said. "I guess he wasn't."

Chippawa hunched his shoulders. The familiar whine of the servos in the suit seemed to get him
back on track. "Well," he said briskly, keying for the radar section of their full-spectrum emscan
sensors. "You'd better give Prime a full tie-in. I'll see what kind of track I can get on the things."

"Right," Faraday said, forcing his fingers to function. Whatever had swum past them had had the
courtesy, or else the sheer clumsiness, to announce its presence with a loud knock on the hull.

Which could potentially be a very serious problem. The Skydiver's hull was designed to handle
immense but steady pressures, not the sharp impact of something solid ramming into it.

He keyed the tie-in first as Chippawa had instructed, giving the tether ship flying far above them full
audio and visual access to what was happening inside the probe as well as the usual telemetry feed.
Then, trying to ignore the feeling in the pit of his stomach, he activated the outside cameras and
started a systematic examination of the hull.

Chippawa got to his finish line first. "Got 'em," he announced. "Four blips, moving off to starboard."

"I thought there were three of them," Faraday said absently, his own fingers pausing as the cameras
located the impact point. It wasn't much, as impact points went; the dent was hardly even noticeable.
But it was a dent.

And as he stared at the image he could swear he could see the marks of teeth...

"There must have been another one we didn't see," Chippawa said. "Wait a second. There are five of
them out there. No; six. Sheester's Mother."

He shook his head. "It's a school of them," he said. "A whole double-clove-latte school. Like a pod
of whales."

"Or piranha," Faraday said. "Take a look at this."

Chippawa glanced at the image on Faraday's display. "One of them bumped us," he said. "We knew
that."

"Look closer," Faraday insisted. "I may be imagining things, but those look like teeth marks."


file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Timothy%20Zahn%20-%20Manta's%20Gift.htm (4 of 298) [10/18/2004 3:39:27 PM]
Manta's Gift