"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles Of Solace 2 - Ocean Of Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

Dom Pedro IV‘s—no, par­don, the “Merchanter’s Dream’s”—forward observation dome.
The massive shutters clamshelled shut, ready to protect the bow of the ship
against the nothingness that loomed just ahead. The thud-clack thud-clack
thud-clack of the shield latches locking down boomed out, transmitted through
the hull of the ship.
“Forward view shields up and locked,” Norla re­ported, quite unnecessarily. If
Marquez couldn’t tell for himself that the shields were up, he had very little
busi­ness flying a timeshaft ship.
But Marquez knew his business, even if he hadn’t flown a timeshaft transition in
the last 128 years—no, longer than that. Add another forty-plus years since we
boarded ship, Norla told herself, and shook her head. Even if the thought was
precisely accurate, it still didn’t make sense. But it didn’t matter. Not now.
Right now all that mattered was that she was the one who had never flown a
timeshaft transition before this trip. But that was about to change.
“Very well,” said Marquez. He pressed the general intercom button. “All hands,
this is the captain. Final strap-in warning. All hands to timeshaft transition
sta­tions. We’re going in.” He turned toward Norla, and grinned at her, an
expression of manic enthusiasm, tinged perhaps with a hint of worry. And even
above and beyond the mere question of deliberately dropping a multimegaton ship
through a black hole and back sev­eral decades into the past, there was plenty
to worry about.
Marquez glanced over to the comm officer’s station, where Admiral Koffield was
sitting. There was distinctly very little for a comm officer to do at this
point. They had sent and received the standard arrival signal and mirror reply
to the Chronologic Patrol ship on station, here on the uptime end of the
timeshaft. Any further communica­tion at this point would almost certainly mean
out-and-out disaster, with a volley of railgun fire about to slam down into
them. Koffield sat where he was because it was a convenient place from which to
watch the proceedings.
If it became anything else, it could only mean the game was up, almost before it
began.
“Ready for the timeshaft, Admiral?”
Admiral Anton Koffield smiled, as open and relaxed an expression as Norla had
ever seen on the man. “Long past ready,” he said. “We have to get through here
be­fore we can get where we’re going. Let’s do it.”
There was an odd eagerness in his voice. Somehow, Norla found herself reminded
of a restless child on a long trip, asking over and over again — “Are we there
yet?”
Well, they wouldn’t be there for a while yet. They had a lot of hoops to jump
through first. But she had no doubt whatsoever that what Anton Koffield was
eager for was to get back in the fight, back in the hunt.
He had been waiting for a long time. In a sense, he had been waiting two hundred
years, and showed no sign at all of tiring. Norla was glad that Anton Koffield
was not in pursuit of her. She had no doubt that every­one else on the ship felt
the same way. Koffield was not the sort of man one wanted to have as an enemy.
“All right, Officer Chandray. You heard the man. Let’s do it!”
“Yes, sir,” she said, feeling far less enthusiasm than she heard in the voice of
the two men. Were they really that excited by the prospect of what lay ahead—or
were they just doing good jobs of acting?
Besides all that, there wasn’t much for her to do at the moment. They were