"Timothy Zahn - Spinneret" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

and several bags of the metal-enriched fertilizer split. One item made him
grimaceтАФone of the broken dishes was a critical pan of the apparatus for
combining the fish ova and sperm they'd brought to Astra. There were spares, of
course, but not enough to satisfy either Meredith or the scientists. Idiots, he
thought harshly. They give me a job to do, and then make sure I've got the

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De.../Zahn,%20Timothy%20-%20Spinneret%20[v1.1].html (22 of 309) [2/1/2004 3:54:12 AM]
Zahn, Timothy - Spinneret


absolute minimum I need to do it with. Which wasn't entirely fair, he knew.
President Allerton was a hundred percent solid behind the colony and always had
been; but it was a handful of shortsighted congressmen who held Astra's
umbilical. They obviously considered the whole thing a UN plot to drain the
United States of manpower and resources and had adjusted the colony's budget
accordingly.

Laying the printout aside, Meredith picked up the next one from the pile. The
months of logic, persuasion, and arm-bending were behind him now, and there
was nothing more to do but get Astra running just as fast and as well as he
possibly could. Uncle Sam's honorтАФnot to mention his own chance of ever
making brigadier generalтАФwas on the line here. The scoffers would be proved
wrong.

And with that settled once again in his mind, he got to work.

It was just over an hour later when his phone buzzed with bad news. "Flyer Two
has gone down, Colonel," a tense-sounding lieutenant reported. "Somewhere
south-southwest of Mt. Olympus, we think."

Meredith felt a shiver go up his back. Near the volcano? He threw a quick look
out the window as he headed across the room, but there was no sign of any smoke
rising from the distant cone. "What happened?" he asked, throwing open the door
and hand-signaling his aide to get the car.

"We're not sure, sir. We got just a fragment of something about the repulsers
going crazy, and then they were cut off."

Damn unreliable alien technology. "Are any of the normal planes in service yet?"

"One of them is, sir."

"Put a medical team aboard and get it in the air. Have them pick me up east of
UnieтАФthey can land on the Unie-Crosse road. Where's Flyer One?"

"Heading toward Olympus, sir. It was over the Kaf Mountains south of here when

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De.../Zahn,%20Timothy%20-%20Spinneret%20[v1.1].html (23 of 309) [2/1/2004 3:54:12 AM]
Zahn, Timothy - Spinneret