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

Manta's Gift



Crushed to death...

He looked up at his partner, expecting to see his same fear in the other's face.

But there was no fear there. Chippawa was concentrating on his board, apparently oblivious to the
fate that was moving like a runaway monorail toward them.

And in that stretched-out instant of time, Faraday hated him. Hated the man's courage and
professional calm. Hated his ability to ignore the fear and the danger.

Hated the twenty extra years of life Chippawa had experienced that Faraday would never have a
chance to taste.

"Getting a reading," Chippawa called out over the wind. "Incoming. About eight meters
longтАФroughly torpedo-shapedтАФ"

"We're falling," Faraday all but screamed at him. So much for the luck of his wooden ring. He was
about to die. They were both about to die. "What the hell does it matterтАФ?"

The sentence was choked off as his armrest again slammed hard into the side of his exoskeleton, the
impact jarring his ribs. "What happened?" he demanded, eyes flickering over his instruments. No
new error messages were showing.

"I don't know," Chippawa said. "It'sтАФoh, boy."

Faraday looked up. And stopped breathing.

The slab of gray had returned. Only this time it had shifted around until an eye was visible.

Gazing steadily through the window at them.

Faraday stared back, the wind and the pressure and even the fact that he was a dead man suddenly
fading into the background. The eye was big and very black, either with no pupil at all or else with
all pupil. The kind of eye that would suck in every bit of radiation across a wide range of the
electromagnetic spectrum, he realized, using every bit of light available to see in the gloom of
Jupiter's deep atmosphere. There was a hint of polygonal faceting around the eye's edge, though it
didn't seem to be an insect-type compound eye.

And like a textbook optical illusion that shifted from duck to rabbit and back to duck again, he
couldn't decide whether the expression in the eye was one of interest, sympathy, or malevolence.

Or maybe that was just his imagination. Or his hopes.

Or his fears.

With an effort, he found his voice. "Should we wave?" he said.