"James Doohan - Flight Engineer Volume 1-The Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doohan James)

soldier’s body, so that if you were careless enough to lose part of
yourself they could come up with a mechanical duplicate.
But it ached still, and it was virtually numb. The techs had said that
once he got used to the signals from the neural interface there would be
more nuance—more of a perception of heat and cold, hard and soft,
though never the sensitivity of his real hand.
And he was still learning to control it. Peter could see the sparkle of
tiny slivers of glass from where he’d shattered the first beer he’d been
given. He’d been brooding, had a flash of temper, and pop! he’d been
picking glass out of his palm. Raeder sighed and shook his head,
remembering what his physical therapist had said.
“Whatever you do, Raeder, for the first few months, anyway, don’t go
into the bathroom mad.”
The worst thing about the prosthesis though, the thing that made him
hate it, was the fact that it couldn’t properly interface with a Speed’s
computer.
A pilot dropped his gloved fingers into receiving cups that plugged
him directly into the ship’s AI. The inside of the glove was filled with
sensors that registered every muscle twitch, analyzed blood pressure, and
the chemical content of your sweat, to make the Speed respond like your
own body. The machine aimed its weapons and took direction from the
position of your eyes, but it was your hands that determined if those
weapons fired and where and how fast you flew.
The prosthesis lacked the subtle control needed, and the chemical
component was nonexistent, which meant that half the controls on the
ship wouldn’t respond as they should. Which meant he was grounded.
His dark brows came together in a frown. It still bit deep and felt like
the amputation of something even more vital than his right hand.
Yeah, he thought glumly, why couldn’t we have just let the Mollies go
when they told us they were leaving? He shook his head and smiled
ruefully. Even the most fervent and naïve conscientious objector knew
the answer to that one. Because without antihydrogen there’s no
commerce between systems, and with no commerce between systems,
Commonwealth civilization would be a fond memory in less than a year.
The Commonwealth had tried to offer a garden planet to the Mollies in
exchange for the desert they’d bought way back when, but their
theocratic rulers, the Interpreters of the Perfect Way, had refused.
Foaming at the mouth and denouncing humanity all the way back to
Adam, I believe.
Because, just to prove God had an ironic sense of humor, the Mollie
cluster proved to be the only place in human-explored space that
contained large amounts of antihydrogen, naturally suspended in a
magnetic matrix material. In the century or so since then, the old
synthetic plants had shut down, their dribble of expensive fuel swamped
by the flood of cheap, abundant power from the mining platforms.
Commerce boomed. The Commonwealth became united as never
before—and very dependent on that flood continuing.
Peter imagined Star Command forcibly evicting the Mollies from their
withered dustball of a planet with its too harsh sun and its half-poisoned
water and transplanting them to a world of soft breezes, luxuriant plant