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there were two kidnappers, they'd be slowed by the extra life-support mass, and we'd arrive about the same time. file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Buying%20Time(1989)[v1].htm (195 of 219)15-8-2005 0:24:35 BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman Where would they come in? Probably Maui or the Seychelles, if they wanted to unload an unconscious passenger in secret and spirit her away. The hangars are underground. White Sands, the Cape, Zaire, and Baikonur are too well monitored. Or they might have used Anchorage themselves, though their landing and unloading could be watched from orbit. I don't like landings. Floating around in space is okay or it used to be, before I had a porthole pop out but takeoffs and landings scare the shit out of me. I didn't like them in airplanes, even before my DC-3 crash, and I don't like them in spaceships. So I took a tranquilizer, which may have been a mistake. Or it may have saved my life, by slowing my reflexes. On Eric's advice we did a "Frisbee" deorbiting maneuver, skimming along the top of the lower atmosphere like a flat stone bouncing over the surface of a lake. It took us an extra orbit, but kept us from having too bright an infrared signature as we came over Pacifica, which would have been the case with a normal braking orbit. But it's not a maneuver you would recommend for the space-shy, since it does entail a lot of bumping and shuddering. I took a second tranquilizer and was able to observe the process with the detachment of a hitchhiking tick securely fastened to a galloping horse. Interesting, how it flings you around. The instant we crossed into Alaska airspace, we simultaneously flipped, destealthed, and blasted. We decelerated hard and Eric surrendered control to the North Anchorage Spaceport. It was twilight, a few minutes after sunset, and to our right the dazzling lights of Anchorage proper were in garish competition with the majestic mountain range that half ringed the city, craggy snow tops glowing peach-pale in the last rays of the sun. The city itself had a powdering of snow, surprising for this late in the year; maybe a tourist gimmick. Most of the acre-wide coruscating signboards for the casinos and whorehouses were in Japanese, with tiny footnote names in English. The airport in central Anchorage was an ultramodern, daring extravagance of offworld materials, a graceful fairyland. The spaceport, ironically, was a huge crumbling ferromac parking lot that wasn't even kept free of snow. We sat down tailfirst at the end of a row of seven smaller ships, with a crawler already headed for us. God forbid that I should jump the four or five meters to the ground and run away without paying the landing tax. Run across the Page 144 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html cherry-red glowing ferromac onto the glare ice where our backsplash had temporarily melted the drifts. I bled in air and swung down to the air lock platform to wait for the crawler. Gravity wasn't too bad; felt kind of good, actually, since I'd been keeping in shape. Eric shouted at me and I sheepishly crawled back up to unplug him from the controls and take him along. "So what's the first thing you're going to do?" Eric said. file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Buying%20Time(1989)[v1].htm (196 of 219)15-8-2005 0:24:35 BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman Part of me conjured up a vision of a thick rare steak and a bottle of rare wine in a place not far from here, where you are served by lovely women who wear nothing but a nametag and a smile. "Find a room with a safe phone and call Kamachi, try to line up some quick and dirty financing. Then maybe a bath." It had been six months since I'd been on a planet with spare water. I remembered that last bath, though, a bloodbath, and touched the crowdpleaser on my belt. I wondered whether it was legal to carry it through the spaceport. Seemed to me that Alaska was as gun-happy as the rest of the western United States, though I remembered you couldn't go armed into a casino. The person or [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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