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

Two went down."

"Cancel that. Have One return to base immediately."

"Yes, sir." The phone went dead for a few seconds: the lieutenant on another line.
"The Cessna's being wheeled out now, Colonel. They'll be leaving in five minutes
or less."

Lieutenant Andrews already had the car running as Meredith slid inside. "Good.
We'll be waiting a couple hundred meters outside town. Let me know immediately
if Two makes any response."

The medical team, it turned out, was unnecessary. Both of the flyer's crewmen
were already dead.

Meredith walked carefully over the crash site, his stomach sore with the ache of
tight muscles. The flyer had gouged a furrow perhaps a hundred meters long,
scattering pieces of itself along the entire length, before coming to rest as a
mangled pile of metal and plastic. The crewmen, similarly mangled, were
discovered still in their cockpit.

It was midaftemoon before the crash specialists finished their survey and returned
to Martello Base. "Near as we can tell, Colonel, all the repulsers just seemed to
quit at once," the captain in charge of the team told Meredith. "We'll know more
when the electronics people finish with the stuff we brought back."

Meredith nodded, gazing past the man as the Cessna was wheeled back into the
hangar. He'd come here with the medical men and bodies earlier in the day,
knowing he would simply be in the way at the crash site and hoping he could get
some work done while the experts sifted through the rubble. The tactic had been
only half successful; his mind had understandably refused to concentrate on
inventories. "Any ideas as to why the repulsers should do that?"

"None, sir. I'd go so far as to say it should be impossible. They run off of three
completely independent systems."



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Zahn, Timothy - Spinneret


"The radar showed they were going pretty slow when it happened. If just the
underside repulsers went out, would they have had time to switch to forward
motion?"

"They should haveтАФthey were high enough and that maneuver's programmed into
the on-board. And if they had tried that and simply not made it up to speed in
time, they would have hit a lot harder than they did." The captain shook his head.