"James Doohan - Flight Engineer Volume 2 - The Privateer-" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doohan James)

“Yes, sir,” Raeder said and saluted. The captain stared at him, and then shook his head—it was a fatherly gesture,
somehow. It certainly makes me feel like a small boy on the carpet. Knott snapped off a salute and left the
courtroom, leaving Raeder to dread both of his appointments.

Flying a Speed was different. The pilot half reclined, fingers planted in cups lined with sensors that responded to
every tiny movement. That response moved the sleek fighters through their deadly acrobatic, and, with the aid of an
eye-tracking mechanism built into the face shield, fired their considerable weaponry with deadly accuracy.
The face shield also showed the pilot a one hundred and eighty degree sweep of the field of stars around her as
well as a heads-up display which overlaid the view. With a precise series of blinks an object could be brought up to
intense magnification. Useful at the speeds and distances the fighter craft could travel.
Sarah James blinked the asteroid she’d spotted back down to size. It glinted as it tumbled, which was what had
first attracted her eye. She was assigned to a routine convoy escort and was just skirting the edges of boredom.
Not that escorting convoys had been all that routine of late. Especially as they approached the jump point. Still,
things had gotten somewhat better now that the powers that be had begun to allocate real weapons and the trained
crews to use them to the merchant ships. At the very least they’d succeeded in thinning the ranks of the pirates.
On the other hand, like natural selection, sometimes the results were not what had been intended. Humanity was
now left with only the most deadly pirates, and cockroaches that could breathe vacuum and eat insecticides.
She looked down at the convoy of freighters. Her Speed looked like a sparrow beside a crocodile in comparison to
the smallest of her charges. But she was the dangerous one despite her relative size. The ships below were reasonably
armed now, but they lacked her Speed’s agility.
There was quite a disparity of character among the freighters. Some were glitteringly new from the factory space-
yard, some old but well tended, some barely spaceworthy, if that.
Sarah dipped her head and sucked on her water tube. Instruments pinged and automatically checked on the
spaceborne bodies they located. So far, all asteroids. The lieutenant commander frowned. Rather a lot of asteroids.
“Computer, is there usually this much clutter in this corridor?” she asked.
“Checking. It varies, Lt. Commander,” the AI responded. “However, I have no previous reports of an asteroid
field containing such large specimens in this area before now.”
Interesting, Sarah thought.
Asteroid fields didn’t just happen. Bodies large and small did drift through space, true, but it was vanishingly
unlikely that a conglomeration of pieces this large would appear without anyone noticing them. The computer
showed they averaged no less than fifty meters long and, depending on the angle, thirty wide.
They’re a navigation hazard for one thing, so they should have been one of the top items in my briefing. Sarah
frowned. There was also a distinct lack of smaller pieces accompanying them. I think my life just got more exciting,
she thought with dawning suspicion.
Had to be more than was meeting the eye here, had to be.
“Escort to convoy,” she said, then spoke the coded phrase that would bring the merchants to red alert. “You are
drifting. Adjust your course on the leader by ten degrees.”
“Escort,” said a surprisingly young voice, “this is Murphy’s Queen. What are you talkin’ about? My instruments
say we’re all perfectly aligned.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. What the hell . . . ?
“If you will check your briefing papers, Murphy’s Queen, you will find that I am in charge out here. And if I tell
you to adjust your alignment by ten degrees, you will adjust your alignment by ten degrees,” she said loudly and
with heavy emphasis, hoping that someone within hearing distance of this kid had in fact read the briefing papers.
 “La-dy! If I adjust our course by ten degrees we’re gonna be a big silver splat on one of these rocks out here.”
Give me strength, Sarah prayed to whoever might be listening.
After a long pause she snapped, “Let me speak to your captain.”
The youngster left the com open and she heard him call out, “Da-ad.”
Good grief! she thought. Sarah was aware that merchanters trained their children by letting them help out on the
ship. But surely, even the most raggedy-assed ship knew better than to leave what sounded like a twelve-year-old in
charge of the bridge during the most dangerous period of their crossing!