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Stephen Baxter: Xeelee: Endurance

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Stephen Baxter Xeelee: Endurance

Xeelee: Endurance: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Return to the eon-spanning and universe-crossing conflict between humanity and the unknowable alien Xeelee in this selection of uncollected and unpublished stories, newly edited and placed in chronological reading order. From tales charting the earliest days of man's adventure to the stars to stories of Old Earth, four billion years in the future, the range and startling imagination of Baxter is always on display. As humanity rises and falls, ebbs and flows, one thing is always needed – the ability to endure. Contains eleven short stories and novellas.

Stephen Baxter: другие книги автора


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I was hardly reassured. ‘What about the entry itself? Your father said we’ll follow an unmanned profile. That sounds . . . vigorous.’

Bill Dzik barked a laugh. Nobody else replied.

Poole and the others began to work through pre-entry system checks. Harry murmured in my ear, telling me that fresh identity backups had just been taken of each of us and stored in the gondola’s systems. I was not reassured.

I lay helpless, trussed up and strapped in, as we plummeted into the sunlit face of Titan.

5

Fifteen minutes after cutting loose from the Crab, the gondola encountered the first wisps of Titan’s upper atmosphere, thin and cold, faintly blue all around us. Still a thousand kilometres above the ground, I could feel the first faltering in the gondola’s headlong speed. Titan’s air is massive and deep, and I was falling backside first straight into it.

The first three minutes of the entry were the worst, as we plunged into the air with an interplanetary velocity, and our speed was reduced violently. Three hundred kilometres above the surface the deceleration peaked at sixteen gravities. Cushioned by Poole’s inertial field I felt no more than the faintest shaking, but the gondola shuddered and banged. Meanwhile a shock wave preceded us, a cap of gas that glowed brilliantly: Titan air battered to plasma by the dissipating kinetic energy of the gondola.

This fiery entry phase was mercifully brief. But when it was over, still we fell helplessly. After another three minutes we were within a hundred and fifty kilometres of the surface, and immersed in an orange haze, the organic-chemistry products of the destruction of Titan’s methane by sunlight. Poole tapped a panel, and a mortar fired above us, hauling out a pilot parachute a couple of metres across. This stabilised us in the thickening air, our backs to the surface, our faces to the sky. Then the main parachute unfolded, spreading reassuringly.

For fifteen minutes we drifted, sinking slowly into a deep ocean of cold, sluggish air. Poole and his colleagues worked at their slates, gathering data from sensors that measured the physical and chemical properties of the atmosphere. I lay silent, curious too, but frightened for my life.

As we fell deeper into the hydrocarbon smog the temperature fell steadily. Sixty kilometres above the surface we fell through a layer of cloud into clearer air beneath, and then, at forty kilometres, through a thin layer of methane clouds. The temperature was close to its minimum here, at only seventy degrees or so above absolute zero. Soon it would rise again. As Poole and his team had discussed, greenhouse effects from the mysterious methane that shouldn’t have been there warm Titan’s air all the way to the ground.

Fifteen minutes after its unpacking, the main parachute was cut away, and a smaller stabiliser canopy opened. Much smaller. We began to fall faster, into the deep ocean of air. ‘Lethe,’ I said. ‘Why did we dump the big chute? We’re still forty kilometres high!’

Bill Dzik laughed at me. ‘Don’t you know anything about the world you’re supposed to be guarding, curator? The air’s thick here, and the gravity’s low, only a seventh of Earth normal. Under that big parachute we’d be hanging in the air all day . . .’

The gondola lurched sideways, shoved by the winds. At least that shut Dzik up. But the winds eased as we fell further, until the air was as still and turgid as deep water. We were immersed now in orange petrochemical haze, though the sun was plainly visible as a brilliant point source of light, surrounded by a yellow-brown halo. The crew gathered data on the spectra of the solar halo, seeking information on aerosols, solid or liquid particles suspended in the air.

And, gradually, beneath our backs, Titan’s ground became visible. I twisted around to see. Cumulus clouds of ethane vapour lay draped over continents of water ice. Of the ground itself I saw a mottling of dark and white patches, areas huge in extent, pocked by what looked like impact craters, and incised by threading valleys cut by flowing liquid, ethane or methane. The crew continued to collect their science data. An acoustic sounder sent out complex pulses of sound. Miriam Berg showed me how some echoes came back double, with reflections from the surfaces and bottoms of crater lakes, like the one my sampling probe had entered.

The gondola rocked beneath its parachute. Poole had suspended the inertial shielding, and, swinging in Titan’s one-seventh gravity, I was comfortable in my thick, softly layered exosuit. The crew’s murmuring as they worked was professional and quiet. I think I actually slept, briefly.

Then there was a jolt. I woke with a snap. The parachute had been cut loose, and was drifting away with its strings dangling like some jellyfish. Our fall was slow in that thick air and gentle gravity, but fall we did!

And then, as Bill Dzik laughed at me again, a new canopy unfurled into the form of a globe, spreading out above us. It was a balloon, perhaps forty, fifty metres across; we were suspended from it by a series of fine ropes. As I watched a kind of hose snaked up from beneath the gondola’s hull and pushed up into the mouth of the balloon, and it began to inflate.

‘So that’s the plan,’ I said. ‘To float around Titan in a balloon! Not very energetic for a man who builds interplanetary wormholes, Poole.’

‘But that’s the point,’ Poole said testily, as if I had challenged his manhood. ‘We’re here under the noses of your curators’ sensors, Emry. The less of a splash we make the better.’

Miriam Berg said, ‘I designed this part of the mission profile. We’re going to float around at this altitude, about eight kilometres up – well above any problems with the topography, but under most of the cloud decks. We ought to be able to gather the science data we need from here. A couple of weeks should be sufficient.’

‘A couple of weeks in this coffin!’

Poole thumped the walls of the gondola. ‘This thing expands. You’ll be able to get out of your suit. It’s not going to be luxury, Emry, but you’ll be comfortable enough.’

Miriam said, ‘When the time comes we’ll climb back up to space from this altitude. The Crab doesn’t carry an orbit-to-surface flitter, but Harry will send down a booster unit to rendezvous with us and lift the gondola to orbit.’

I stared at her. ‘You’re saying we don’t carry the means of getting off this moon?’

Miriam said evenly, ‘Mass issues. We need to stay under the curacy sensors’ awareness threshold. Plus we’re supposed to look like an unmanned probe, remember. Look, it’s not a problem.’

‘Umm.’ Call me a coward, many have. But I didn’t like the idea that my only way off this wretched moon was thousands of kilometres away, and my access to it depended on a complicated series of rendezvous and coupling manoeuvres. ‘So what’s keeping us aloft? Hydrogen, helium?’

Poole pointed at that inlet pipe. ‘Neither. This is a hot-air balloon, Emry, a Montgolfier.’ And he gave me a lecture on how hot-air technology is optimal if you must go ballooning on Titan. You have the buoyancy of the thick air, and the gravity is weak, and at such low temperatures you get a large expansion of your heated gas in response to a comparatively small amount of energy. Add all these factors into the kind of trade-off equation men like Poole enjoy so much, and out pops hot-air ballooning as the low-energy transport of choice on Titan.

Miriam said, ‘We’re a balloon, not a dirigible; we can’t steer. But for a mission like this it’s enough for us to go pretty much where the wind takes us; all we’re doing is sampling a global ecosphere. And we can choose our course to some extent. The prevailing winds on Titan are easterly, but below about two kilometres there’s a strong westerly component. That’s actually a tide, raised by Saturn in the thick air down there. So we can select which way we get blown, just by ascending and descending.’

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