"Doohan, James & Stirling, S M - Flight Engineer 02 - The Privateer 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doohan James)

The general smiled. "What I have to show you is highly classified. Nothing
that I tell you, regardless of whether you decide to accept this mission
or not, is to leave this room. Do you understand?"

Unless you're planning to use me as a human hand grenade, I'm in, Peter
thought. So discretion won't be a problem.

"Yes, sir."

Scaragoglu gave him an appraising look, then activated a holo display. The
room lights dimmed automatically and a view of an asteroid field snapped
into clear focus.

Tumbling rocks scanned by, sixteen centimeters above the surface of the
general's desk. A little scale marker at the bottom of the image told
Raeder that they ranged from palm-sized to the magnitude of small moons.
And those were just the ones that could be seen at this magnification.

Raeder winced. Messy, he thought.

"This asteroid field is in Mollie space," the general explained. "No
habitable planet in the system, but plenty of nice rich rocks with shallow
gravity wells. Used to belong to the Consortium, but it's been abandoned
since the Commonwealth won the war." He shrugged. "You can see why; it's
in the middle of nowhere. There are always a few misanthropic miners that
are looking for a berth like this, but the proximity of Mollies drove even
them away."

Peter smiled at the mild joke.

"There's still a lot of palladium to be harvested there, but it will have
to wait until we've won the war."

The general did something and the recording speeded up, then stopped.
Scaragoglu touched one particular asteroid with a laser pointer, and the
computer brought the undistinguished lump of rock into magnified view. The
scale made it three klicks long, approximately, and a half a kilometer
wide. It looked vaguely like a sausage.

"This was the miners' hutch." The general touched the nose of the big rock
with his pointer and the view switched to give Peter a head-on view of the
asteroid. As usual with holos taken in space there was no sense of depth
to the huge black circle on one end. "This shadow indicates the opening to
a rough, but endurable base."

Peter nodded thoughtfully. It would be rough, the Consortium wasn't
inclined to coddle the miners they'd all but enslaved. But there would be
perfectly reasonable conditions for a covert military operation.

"You want to put a spy post there?" he guessed.