"Simon Furman - Alignment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Furman Simon)

 Alignment
by Simon Furman

Book 1
What they needed, Grimlock decided, was a Unicron.

This was not a sudden conclusion. In common with most all of the Dinobot
commander’s somewhat rare insights, this undertaking had involved long hours,
days, weeks even of painstaking deliberation. Grimlock was not stupid, and not
slow, Indeed, in battle his speed, judgment and reflexes were second to none. But
he was sometimes pedestrian when it came to deep thinking.

The problem that had started Grimlock lumbering off down this particular
cognitive path stemmed from their current mission. They were now into day 78 of
a deep space odyssey to the outer fringes of the Hadean system. Their Autobot
Hyperwave skimmer was already beyond existing star charts, far into the
wilderzones, where no other Transformer - or indeed known species - had
ventured. And so far nada, zip, nothing. All they’d found was a big, empty hunk
of space and Grimlock was bored beyond belief.

Day 78 had dawned - if indeed such terminology was applicable without so much
as a single star within seventy billion light years - much like the previous seventy-
seven. As the mission’s Flight Leader, Grimlock was expected to officially
relieve the ‘night’ watch helmsman and hand over to the ‘day’ shift. What had
actually happened was that Grimlock had crashed so loudly onto the forward
bridge, he’d woken Blaster, who had let his systems idle when the monotony had
finally, totally overwhelmed him.

Both had reacted with surprise. Grimlock because he’d somehow blundered onto
the bridge when actually he’d been bound for the particle showers, and Blaster
because his internal chronometer immediately registered that he’d been in exactly
the same position, undisturbed, since Day 71.

Blaster had stalked off angrily, bound for the rec room, where the rest of the crew
had no doubt idled for the past several days, his existence a fading memory. His
intention was to amp up his chest speakers to max, plug himself into the ship’s
intercom system and fry their audio sensors with Quarian thrash. Grimlock,
meanwhile, had stared, as if confused by the bridge and its unfamiliar geometry,
uncertain of its function, and then exited without a backward glance.

In the empty bridge, automated systems ticked stoically on, charting the void
ahead, endlessly meticulous. Every spike and echo of space noise was categorized
and logged, every fluctuation in the radio-magnetic spectrum registered, every
spatial anomaly recorded. External sensors reached out long, invisible filaments
into the emptiness, probing, searching... for energon.

****

‘What kind of job that?’ Grimlock had demanded of acting Autobot leader Ultra
Magnus. ‘Me warrior, not boy scout!’ In the high chamber of the so-called Stellar