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

"You're imagining things," Chippawa declared. "Come on. Anything bigger than a puppy knows
better than to chew on metal."

"Unless it's what they eat," Faraday countered crossly. Chippawa didn't have to dismiss his concerns
quite so cavalierly.

"What, in the Jovian atmosphere?" Chippawa scoffed. "You think floating metal grows on trees
around... oh, my God."

"What?" Faraday demanded, spinning around to his own emscan display.

And felt his skin prickling. There was a school of the fat mantas out there, all right. Maybe two
dozen of them.

All of them clustered around two very large blips. Blips, if the radar could be believed, that were
each the size of a nice little starter house in the suburbs.

Chippawa's comment on this development would undoubtedly have been a very interesting one. But
he never got the chance to make it Even as Faraday's brain registered the size of the newcomers the
probe lurched, the background humming hiccupping into a sudden twang. "WhatтАФ?" Faraday
yelped.

"Something hit the tether," Chippawa said. "ThereтАФlook."

Faraday craned his neck. Another of the fat mantas was scooting along across the edge of the
Skydiver's light cone. Unlike the others, this one seemed to be trailing an expanding mist of bright
yellow. "He didn't just hit the tether," he said, the bad feeling in his stomach getting suddenly worse.
"He cut himself on it."

"Sure looks like it," Chippawa agreed as the manta vanished outside the range of their lights. "Better
check it out." He reached for the camera controlтАФ

And suddenly the probe was slammed violently sideways.

Faraday grabbed at his board as his chair bounced down out from under him and then slammed hard
up against his tailbone again. A stray thought caught oddly at the back of his mind; what had
happened to his coffee cup and was it leaking on anything. There was a second jolt, this one from the
other side, then a third that seemed to come from above. Something that looked like a gray wall
studded with randomly placed dimples slid past bare centimeters from the Quadplexi. There was
another slam from above, the worst one yetтАФ

And with a horrible twisting of Faraday's stomach, his chair fell away from beneath him and didn't
come back up. The tether to the ship above had been broken, and the probe was in free fall.

"Floats!" Chippawa snapped.

Faraday already had the safety cover wrenched up and out of the way. "Floats," he repeated, and

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