"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 04 - Hunted" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

"Ship-soul, attend," I called out... hoping that was still the phrase you used when you wanted to talk to a
starship's central computer. "Can you please call the security officer who's on watch?"

A sexless metallic voice answered from the ceiling: "There are no security officers available."

Uh-oh.

"Ship-soul," I said, "please connect me with..." Who? The captain? No, he was dead inside the
hive-queen. (I avoided looking that direction; even if the queen was just a hologram, she still gave me the
jitters.) "Please connect me with the ship's commanding officer."

"The commanding officer is Explorer Second Class Edward York."

"Me?"

"You are the highest-ranking officer aboardWillow."

I swallowed. "Is anyone else alive at all?"

"No, Captain. Awaiting your instructions."



Nobody had ever put me in charge of anything before. That was fine with me; I knew I wasn't captain
material.

If you want the honest truth, I wasn't Explorer material either. When Samantha joined the navy's
Diplomatic Corps, she absolutely insisted I go with her on her first assignment. She wanted me for her
bodyguard—the only person in the universe she could trust one hundred percent. I figured Dad would
make a big fuss, but he gave in almost immediately; Sam knew all the ways to make him say yes, and he
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never found a single way to tell her no.

Being an admiral and all, Dad pulled strings to slip me around the entrance qualification board and
straight into the navy. He didn't want me going Diplomatic like Sam—Dad had been a diplomat himself
before becoming an admiral, and he refused to let me "sully" the Diplomacy Corps's gold uniform. For a
while he was set on me being a Security officer, since the Security Corps was officially in charge of
protecting Outward Fleet dignitaries... but that fell through when the senior Security admiral got pissy
about Dad forcing "a totally inadequate imbecile" into her command. (The Security admiral had never set
eyes on me; I guess she'd heard Dad bad-mouth me for so long, she pictured someone all gibbering and
drooling.) Dad tried three more service corps without any luck, then he finally just made me an Explorer.
I never went to Explorer Academy—you can't get past the door there unless you havereal brains—but
Dad said I'd still fit in just fine with the other Explorers. "None of them are normal either."

I wondered if my father might possibly feel proud of me now, seeing as I'd become a sort of a kind of a