"James Doohan - Flight Engineer Volume 3 -The Independent Com" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doohan James)

“I was foolish, Majesty, I am truly sorry to have offended you.”
“You have done worse than offend me, worm.” She dropped him in contempt. “You have
disappointed me.”
She slashed him several times with her tailwhip, each strike depositing a healthy dose of
acid on his chitin. The humiliation was worse than the pain.
“Leave me,” she said, turning her back on him. “I don’t want to see you again until you are
whole.”
Excarix slunk from the room, smoke writhing around the holes in his carapace. It would be
months before he would be allowed into her glorious presence again. And he had not
delivered his message.
 CHAPTER ONE

Commander Peter Ernst Raeder gazed contentedly at the scenery flashing by, sipped his
perfectly chilled champagne, stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankles.
The mag-lev train on which he was a passenger was an antique, a feature of travel on Come
By Chance, and the most luxurious method of travel he’d ever sampled. The extra cost of
first-class private accommodations was well worth the money. The seats were wide and
comfy, the leg room ample, the windows enormous and the company . . . Raeder glanced at
Lieutenant Commander Sarah James and caught her watching him instead of the lush
mountains they traveled through.
He smiled, she smiled; warm, fuzzy, blissful, idiot happiness infused the air. Raeder could
care less about anything just now but the rightness of things as they currently stood between
him and Sarah James of the rich russet hair, the smooth lips, the . . .
They clinked glasses and gave each other the conspiratorial grins of people in love. The
glorious forest-meadow-mountain vistas of Come By Chance came in a poor second to the
limitless horizons they saw in each other’s eyes. The scent of pine and spring flowers went by
unnoticed.
Suddenly Peter began to chuckle.
“What?” Sarah asked.
“Oh, it’s just that this,” he gestured around him with his glass, ended by tipping it in her
direction, “is a switch.”
Sarah gave him a look of smiling confusion.
“A switch from what?” Her eyes betrayed the flash of thought, Us?
“I’m not under suspicion, on suspension or awaiting trial.” He leaned in closer. “Or alone.”
Her lips twitched in acknowledgement. “In fact,” Peter continued, leaning back with a
slightly smug smile tugging at his lips, “everything is going incredibly smoo—”
There was a jerk, and the ear-torturing, inhuman screech of metal scraping against metal
with phenomenal force. Raeder and Sarah were shaken and tossed like dice in a box, flung
back and forth against each other and the sides of the compartment. The bellow of ripping
steel struck the ear like a blow; so loud that Raeder couldn’t hear his own voice when he
shouted Sarah’s name. . . .
Things are back to normal, he thought. All screwed up. And here I thought the gods had
relented.
Memory scrolled through his mind. He hoped it wasn’t the end-of-life flashback you were
supposed to get; at least it wasn’t his whole life. Just the start of his latest planetside
leave. . . .

Raeder gripped his carryall a little tighter and squared his jaw. He exited the tiny shuttle to
find himself at a landing area so small it barely existed, just a circle of cerement large enough
to hold the shuttle and a few antennae. He walked towards the security shack, which was no