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

the screams of spacers months dead still ripped through his mind
whenever he let himself remember.
“Bo thinks the service is riddled with Mollie traitors,” Gardner
whispered. “He says you weren’t spotted early, you weren’t unlucky,
you were set up.”
Peter glanced at her; she was fairly twanging with outrage at what had
happened to her brother. Hell, I’m pretty outraged at what happened to
me, he thought. And she could be right. There’d be no easy way to tell a
Mollie from a Welter.
Of course the Mollies might have calculated that Riga Five was the
most likely of their processors to get hit and set up an ambush. Though I
hate to think of them being that smart. Of course he hated to think of
them being comfortably ensconced in the Commonwealth High
Command, too. Although at the level of the Echelons Beyond Reality,
lack of brains might not be obvious. Which was an outright slander and
he knew it, but that kind of thought was almost a tradition.
In reality, since the start of the war, accelerated promotion had brought
many fine and competent officers into the upper ranks and the gold far
outweighed the dross these days. It had become exceedingly rare to meet
an officer who’d been promoted merely because there was nothing
especially wrong with him.
“Gardner,” Peter said kindly, “Bo might be right. So it’s probably a
good idea to be cautious and close-mouthed. But we’re neither of us in
Intelligence, so I don’t see any advantage to getting paranoid about it.
That’s got to be more aggravation than it’s worth.”
She frowned as she thought it over. “Yeah. I suppose you’re right.”
Then she shrugged herself into a better mood. Smiling, Gardner asked,
“Tell me about my brother? And give me your news so I can tell him
what you’re up to.”
“Tell you about your brother?” Peter Raeder smiled a long slow smile.
Here’s where I get even. Bo had been one of his best friends, but there
was an old service axiom that you could trust someone with your life but
not a bottle or your date. He’d gone to the washroom during a dance and
come back to find that Bo had told the girl he was taken sick, and Bo was
off escorting that little beauty home. . . .
“Let me tell you about the time Bo decided to release these lab rats in
the air ducts of the Defiance. He—”
The three hours to their flight window passed very agreeably as
Raeder loaded up Bo Gardner’s little sister with enough juicy stories to
allow her to blackmail her big brother for years to come. And if she was
a real Gardner, she’d use them with relish.
 CHAPTER TWO

Cape Hatteras had been a Commonwealth Space Command
launchpoint for a long time, well over a century; besides that, wartime
expansion had building going on in a round-the-clock frenzy. There were
launch pits for everything from heavy beam-boosted cargo lifters to the
smallest personnel shuttles, repair docks, giant reaction-mass tanks to
hold the distilled water, barracks, warehousing, and a sprawling civilian
settlement around it. All Peter saw of it was the processing facility where