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

Captain Dad came on with a gruff, “What’shappening?”
“Sir,” Sarah said, biting off each word. “If, as indicated in your briefing papers, you would please adjust your
course alignment by ten degrees, I would appreciate it.”
“Whaddayoutalkin’about? We’re in perfect alignment.”
AAARRRGGHH!!!
“Did you read your briefing paper?” Sarah demanded.
“No-o.”
“Go read it now,” she insisted. “I’ll wait.” And if there are pirates out there and they’re listening to all this
briefing papers, ten degrees, wink, wink, nudge, nudge stuff, they should be powering up any second now. If I get my
hands on this guy, assuming I live through the next twenty minutes, I’m going to clean his clock!
“Ooooh,” said Murphy’s Queen’s captain with elephantine obviousness. “Adjust my course by ten degrees. Yes,
ma-am!” And he was gone without signing off.
“Neutrino output detected,” the computer said calmly. Flashing lights indicated four of the larger asteroids.
“Signal is commensurate with ship power plants activating.”
Nooo kidding, Sarah thought sarcastically. She brought her weapons online automatically.
“Designate which came first, second and so on,” she ordered the computer. The blinking lights flashed red,
yellow, blue and green in sequence. Next came the part she hated most. “Unknown ships, please identify yourselves
immediately or be fired upon.”
Nothing like warning the enemy. But it couldn’t be helped. People did stupid things, like hiding in the bushes,
then shaking them and growling when their well-armed hunting buddies came back to camp. Similarly, this might be
a cluster of tramp merchants hoping to join the convoy rather than a group of pirates. It was never wise to be too
trigger-happy. She forced herself to count to ten. Okay, long enough, she thought.
Sarah fired on the asteroid marked in red just as a ship burst free of its cover. Fusion-driven particle beam met
carbonaceous chondrite rock and turned it into small but high-velocity shrapnel, slashing into the raider before it
could build up enough delta-v to escape. The front part of the fuselage spun off out of control and crashed into the
massive side of one of the freighters, in a mist of frozen air and volatiles from both craft.
Sarah winced, hoping there wouldn’t be many casualties. But she was only aware of the disaster peripherally.
She’d already fired on the yellow asteroid, and apparently destroyed the ship lurking behind it. But now blue and
green were out of cover and swooping down on her.
All right, roughly corvette-sized. Pirate ships weren’t built to order, but they usually had fairly massive power
plants for their mass. Pirates were in business to intimidate and loot, not fight—and they liked to be able to run away,
too.
Blue came on aggressively, while green hung back. Sarah’s fingers twitched in the sensor gloves, and a small
light strobed in the corner of her vision—the missile’s sensors locking on to green.
“Away,” the AI said passionlessly, and the Speed shuddered briefly as the weapon streaked away. She put her
Speed into a roll and snapped off a barrage of energy-beam fire at Mr. Blue. . . .
Care-ful, she thought calmly, don’t lose control. She came out of it to find her opponents doing just fine. Well,
hell. There was a fading nimbus of plasma where a close-in defense weapon had intercepted her missile.
And they were both approaching her with a bit more respect. But they were still willing to fight.
“Following trajectory,” she told her AI, and traced a curve that would put the pirates between her and the
merchanters . . . and their newly formidable armaments. Even then, some part of her consciousness was aware of the
backdrop, stars innumerable and burning with the clear bright colors of vacuum.
Let’s distract Mr. Blue, she thought, and took the Speed looping over in a dive almost as abrupt as a winged craft
in atmosphere. She faked a drive towards blue, then fired on green. The Speed bucked slightly as the particle beam
slashed out, invisible to human eyes, marked on her vision by the fighter craft’s systems . . .
Woah. That was visible to the naked eye, a corona of light expanding around the green marker that the sensor
system had painted on her vision. Nobody who’d seen combat in space could mistake what it meant; a containment
vessel had failed, and matter and antimatter had come into contact . . . and the rest of the pirate craft was now an
expanding ball of ionized gas.
Blue flashed past at an angled vector and took off for the tall timber, or at least for the hyper limit. Sarah killed