Pokrewne

Start
Chelsea Handler Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (epub
Brit Brinson [Dia of the Dead Dia of the Dead (epub)
Cody Goodfellow [Radiant Dawn Radiant Dawn (epub)
Cate Tiernan [Immortal Belove Immortal Beloved (epub)
C J Busby [Deep Amber 01] Deep Amber (retail) (epub)
Carl Ashmore [Time Hunters 01 The Time Hunters (epub)
Drew Hayes [Super Powereds 02 Super Powereds Year 2 (epub) i
Beth Harbison [Shoe Addict 02 Secrets of a Shoe Addict (epub)
Cara Lynn Shultz [Dark World The Dark World (retail) (epub)
[heft] Perry Rhodan 1967 Die List des Scoctoren

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.There was no cheering, and no applause.There was just an old man, standing alone in the cold.And then he was gone.The distance from the Belt to Jupiter was nearly as great as that between the Belt and the sun.It had been almost four months since Gabriel had left behind Pallas, the last human outpost, buried deep within its asteroid.She was now traveling at a speed that had never been matched in human history—and she still wasn’t quite there.To most, the gulf was almost incomprehensibly vast.The Pacific Ocean covers an entire hemisphere, but on a map all the eye sees are the tiny continents that float on either side of it.Humanity had many names for the sheer space that lay beyond the Belt—the red zone, deep heaven, the black.But to the men and women of the Agency it would always be the outside.Elena called up a map of the region on the holo.The image of Gabriel fell away and receded into a dot, and then disappeared entirely as Jupiter rose into view.The scale of the image was so huge that Elena could see every one of its six dozen moons, and even the trojan asteroids, which preceded and followed Jupiter in its orbit like an honor guard at a distance of almost one billion kilometers.She adjusted the holo and displayed the local gravitational fields.A few tens of thousand kilometers ahead of Gabriel, the lines of force surrounding the planet met and coiled around an invisible knot in space.This was the lagrange point, where the gravities of Jupiter and the Sun meshed and canceled each other out.Anything that entered a buffer like this one could hover almost indefinitely, pinned between the two giants.It was the perfect place for the first line of defense, and the unofficial border marking outsider territory.It was also where the Solstice and her seven person crew, Earth’s first manned mission to Jupiter, had been lost forty years before.Humanity hadn’t been back since.Elena was trying very hard to forget that Gabriel had never been intended to do this alone.But she wasn’t alone—not quite.“Contact.” Vijay’s voice was steady, as if this weren’t only his second time in combat.“Cherub reports contact.”“Alert stations, warning yellow,” Elena said.“Vijay, arm missiles.Weapons hold.”Gabriel carried eight of these, twenty tonnes of heavy metal and high explosive.Up until recently, they had been the most powerful weapons in the Space Agency’s arsenal—every one of Earth’s nuclear warheads had been hunted down and destroyed pursuant to the Treaty of Jerusalem, which every officer was sworn to uphold.“Hassoun, tell the engine room we’re going cold.Keep the avram online, but switch over to batteries, vital systems only.”At the very aft of the ship, the chief engineer shut off the fuel cells, and Gabriel began to rapidly cool.Battery power was more than enough to keep the basic life support and sensor systems running, and even the avram at the center of the ship.But everything else went into hibernation, even the guns arrayed on every side of the hull against missile attacks.“Auxiliaries only.Rockets and thrusters cold,” Demyan said.The ship’s speed hadn’t changed at all.In fact, Gabriel hadn’t fired either rockets or thrusters in months.With no gravity or friction to hold her back she continued to hurtle forth towards the border under her own momentum.By dashing at the enemy headfirst Gabriel had kept the thin edges of the sails facing outwards, rather than their broad faces, and running cold could buy her a few more precious hours.But if the outsiders detected her now, she’d be defenseless, unable to fight back or even to run.Gabriel had long since passed the point of no return.“Firing solution?”“Not yet,” Vijay said.“All we have is bearing.”“How did Cherub find him?”“Short burn.Probably a course adjustment.”Vijay brought it up on the holo.Gabriel still shone with a faint gleam of waste heat, but the blaze of a rocket flare could be seen for millions of kilometers.Even magnified and projected in sharp three dimensions, the exhaust flame was little more than a red smear of infrared light.Elena supposed that a nearsighted man saw a candle in a darkened room in much the same way.“Estimated distance, thirty thousand kilometers.” Demyan read off the six-digit string that represented its location relative to Gabriel.“Are we coming out of the sun?”Demyan shook his head.“We’re a degree or two out of line,” he said.“The corona might hide us for a while.But only for a while.”“Burn duration was six point six seconds,” Hassoun said.“Exhaust temperature, three thousand Kelvin plus.” The rocket plume had been hot to enough to boil steel.“Doppler study,” Demyan said.“Estimated velocity, ten kilometers per second.”“Firing solution ready, weapons hold,” Vijay said.He would fire only upon order or attack.Gabriel would get only one chance.“At that speed and that temp, it masses about ten thousand kilograms,” Elena said.Demyan and Hassoun briefly looked up at that—at the number itself, or the fact that she found it mentally.“Bantamweight,” Vijay said.“Decoy,” Elena said.She shook her head.“That burn was way too hot and too long.”“I agree.A ship that small should need only a nudge.”“That’s our index point,” she said, jabbing a finger at the holo as it zoomed out.The distance between Gabriel and the enemy was so great that the two ships were mere pinpricks in the air.“We start at the center, and work our way out.”She clicked her keysticks quickly, and numbers shimmered at the center of the bridge.3:12:00.It began to count down.“Three hours to the border,” Elena said.“Start the music.”Ten thousand kilometers to either side of Gabriel, angels began to sing.The Global Union had never dared to challenge the outsiders directly, or to take their warships off the home front.And even if they had wanted to, the decimated Earth nations of the Solstice era had been in no shape to raise an armada and send it to battle.Most Agency warships were drone carriers, built to ferry robotic soldiers to and from the battlefield.Elena had begun her own career in drone fabrication, before becoming an operator.The Archangels had been built to finally take the war to the enemy, but Gabriel had brought her squires with her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]