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

I can’t believe this infant can fly and I’m grounded, he thought. She
looked young enough to be playing hooky from school. He slid the disk
into his wrist reader. Yup. Report to CSF Invincible via blah blah, and so
on and so forth. He didn’t recognize the name, which was odd—even
now, fleet carriers weren’t all that numerous. The numerical code was
definitely for a carrier, though.
Oh, please, please, not an escort carrier. Not a converted
merchantman shepherding transports and supply ships . . .
“We’re scheduled for seventeen hundred hours, sir.”
Three hours, he thought. And not much to do with them. The shuttle
pilot still stood before him. Smiling expectantly. I feel like I ought to tip
her. Except that you didn’t do things like that. Not outright, anyway.
“Ah, if you have time, would you like a drink?” What am I saying?
“Coffee, juice or something?” You’re not sucking down any ethanol just
before flying my fanny to the moon, kid. Some regulations had good solid
sense behind them.
She giggled. “I am over twenty-one, sir. But I would love some coffee.
Thank you.” She hopped onto a stool beside him. “My name’s Gardner. I
had a brother in your squadron.”
“You’re Bo Gardner’s sister?” She didn’t look anything like him.
“How is he?”
“Much better,” Gardner said, her young face suddenly solemn. “They
say he’ll be walking by the end of the year.”
“If anybody can do it Bo can,” Raeder assured her. “Your brother’s
one of the best.”
“He said the same thing about you.” Her grin faded and she looked at
him seriously, an expression that didn’t suit her. “Why do you think it
happened like that? Why were the Mollies at Riga Five in such
numbers?”
Peter grimaced. His remaining palm turned slightly damp. “Good
question. I wonder myself,” he said. As a matter of fact, kid, I dream
about it, far too often.
By rights it should have been just another raid on the Mollie
processing plants. Load up the antihydrogen and get out with minimal
losses to both sides. “What did Bo say?”
“He said it looked like they were expecting us.”
“It did.” Peter nodded. “And they couldn’t have dug in and gotten
ready for business that quickly if their first warning came when we
crossed the line.”
Raeder could see it in his mind’s eye. The processing plant was a big,
gray-blue island floating above the orange-brown disk of Riga Five.
There’d been a couple of freighters nuzzled up against the plant’s
docking tubes and nothing else was visible except the planet’s two
moons.
“They must have been there for a while,” he continued softly. “There
was nothing for the sensors to report. No Transit signatures less than a
week old.” Peter shook his head. “The place was as quiet and cold as it
should have been. The captain sent us on a quick reconnoiter and we
were well on our way when the Mollies struck. Two Space Command
ships gone, just like that.” He took a sip of his beer, his eyes far away,