Halo: First Strike by Eric S. Nylund Read Free Book Online Page A

asteroids transported
    into trans-Earth orbit, Earth's bounty stood close and remained
    richer and more desirable than anything found in huge piles of
    crushed lunar soil or wandering frozen rock.
    #
     
    Standing at a v-phone booth in the hotel lobby, Gonzales made
    his farewell calls.  His mother's message tape on the phone screen
    said, "Glad to hear you're back from Myanmar, dear, but you'll
    have to call back in a few days.  I'm in treatment now.  I'll be
    looking good the next time you call."
     
    "End of call," Gonzales said.  He pulled his card from the
    slot.
    #
     
    Atop a sand-colored blockhouse next to the launch pad, yellow
    luminescent letters read TIME 23:40:00 and TIME TO LAUNCH
    35:00 when a voice said, "Please board.  There will be one
    additional notice in five minutes.  Board now."
     
    Gonzales and Diana Heywood walked across the pad together,
    down the center of a walkway outlined in blinking red lights. 
    Robotrucks scurried away, their electric engines whining.  Faces
    hidden behind breather muzzles, men and women in bright orange
    stood atop red, wheeled platform consoles of girder and wire mesh
    and directed final pre-launch activities.
     
    The white saucer stood on its fragile-seeming burn cradle, a
    spider's web of blackened metal.  The saucer presented a smooth
    surface to the heat and stress of escape and re-entry. 
    Intermittent surges of venting propellant surrounded it with
    steam.
     
    A HICOG guard stood at the entrance glideway.  He verified
    each of them with a quick wave of an identity wand across their
    badges, then passed them on through the search scanner.  The
    glideway lifted them silently into the saucer's interior.
    #
     
    The hotel lounge stood halfway up the cliff.  Its fifty meter
    wide window of thick glass belled out and up so that onlookers had
    a good view of the launch and ensuing climb.
     
    "One minute to launch," a loudspeaker said.  The hundred or
    so people in the lounge, most of them friends and relatives of
    saucer passengers, had already taken up places by the window bell.
     
    The screen on a side wall counted down with gold numerals
    that flashed from small to large, traditional celebration both
    sentimental and ironic:
    10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-
     
    ZERO!!!         And everyone cheered the saucer lifting from the
    center of billowing clouds of smoke, rising very slowly out of
    floodlights, then their breath caught at the size and beauty of
    it, trembling into night sky.
     
    Up and up as they watched, until they saw the ignition flash,
    and the boom that came to them from five thousand feet shuddered
    the entire cliff and them with it.
    #
     
    "I've got orbital lock," the primary onboard computer said. 
    Five others calculated and confirmed its control sequences. 
    Technically, Ground Control McAuliffe or Athena Station Flight
    Operations could preempt control, but, practically, decision and
    control took place within milli-second or less windows of
    possibility, and so the onboard computers had to be adequate to
    all occasions.
     
    Never deactivated, the ship's half-dozen computers practiced
    even when not flying, playing through ghastly and unlikely
    scenarios of mechanical failure, human insanity, "acts of god" in
    which the ship was struck by lightning, spun by tornado funnel,
    hurricane, blizzard.  Each computer believed itself best, but
    there was little to choose among them.
     
    "Confirm go state," Athena Station said.  "You are past abort
    or bail."
     
    "We are ready, Athena," the computer said.
     
    "So come to me, then," Athena Station said, and the ship
    began to climb the beam of coherent light that reached up thirty
    thousand miles, to the first station of its journey.
     
     
     
    PART II. of V.
     
    Recently I visited a Zen temple and had a long talk with the
    priest.  In the course of our conversation, I remarked, 'The more
    I study robots, the less it seems possible to me that the spirit
    and flesh are separate