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

"I will pass your offer to the proper reviewers. Farewell."

Turning, the Rooshrike walked up the ramp and disappeared back into his ship.
Meredith's escort, which had parked a respectful fifty meters back, drove forward
to pick him up, and within half a minute they were speeding toward the control
tower and the safety of distance. They needn't have worried; Beaeki waited until
they were well clear before withdrawing the ramp and starting the plasma
compression cycle.

The launch, a few minutes later, was more spectacular than even the landing had
been. The ship drifted almost leisurely upward at first, its repulsers muted in
obvious consideration for the permcrete; but at a hundred meters the white spears
abruptly became a pillar of fire, and the ship shot up like a fly off a table. Five
seconds later the drive repulsers added forward motion; a minute after that it was
lost to sight past the hazy cone of Mt. Olympus to the east.

Seated next to Meredith in the car, Lieutenant Andrews let out a low whistle.
"Either the Rooshrike have one hell of a technology," he commented, "or else the
repulsers the Ctencri sold us are about five generations behind state of the art."

"Probably both." Meredith felt drained, as if he'd just spent the morning before a
hostile congressional committee. "Well, I guess that's our taste of diplomacy for
the week. Let's get back to work, shall we?"

Chapter 5
Beaeki's departure coincided with the beginning of over a week of relative quiet
on Astra, a breather that allowed Meredith to finally get the colony back on some
sort of schedule. Whether it was the small concessions he'd thrown to the militants
in Ceres or whether the adjustment to Astra's twenty-seven-hour day had simply
worn everyone out, he didn't know. Whatever the reason, though, he was grateful.

News from other fronts was somewhat less encouraging. The fields at Crosse had
finally been enriched enough for planting to begin, but they were still losing

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Zahn, Timothy - Spinneret


metals too fast. Proposals for countermeasures began to clog Meredith's desk, and
he had to pull two of Major Brown's engineers off construction work to do
cost/practicality studies on all of them. The offshore mining had begun, but it was
quickly becoming evident that unless the Rooshrike could be induced to buy some
of the final products, the whole scheme was going to be a gigantic waste of
money. Given the lackluster support the UN was giving the colony already, a
failure of its one potential money-making project might induce them to simply
throw in the towel. To Meredith that would be nearly equivalent to losing a war, a
scenario of national dishonor that he had no desire to preside over. But if there
were any other way for the colony to help support itself, neither he nor any of the
scientists he'd put the problem to had been able to find it.