"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

here, alone except for a polite, gentle little dog, surrounded by the eternal
glow of the core worlds, the possibility of coming face to face with the
planet killers was a bit more real.

Look on this world and tremble. Build not, for we shall return.

With a fully charged generator she double-checked the visuals, ran a
deep-search with all available ship's instruments, and, holding her breath,
took the first blink from coordinates on the star chart drawn by her
father's old shipmate. She and the ship arrived. As she prepared for the
next jump, Mop came to her and politely asked to be held. She took him
into her lap.

"You're nervous, too?" she asked.

He licked her thumb. Just once.
 "Don't blame you, little buddy," she said. "But hang in there, huh?" She
poised her finger over the button. "Heeeeeere we go."

After the little wrench to the system that is standard with a blink, she
looked at the viewers. Still lots of stars. Still closer to the core. And it took
still longer for the computer to chuckle its way to a conclusion about
location, for the stars around them were not included on the ship's charts
and the computer had to backcheck behind them until it found a familiar
correlation.

Once again, and again, and a long wait for charging with a storm of
solar winds eddying and seething around the ship, straining the capacity
of the radiation shields built between the hulls.

"One more time," she told Mop. She pushed the button. Mother leapt.
Mop sat down, his long hair hiding his rear legs, lifted his sharp little
muzzle toward what the ship's gravity told him was the ceiling, and
howled.

Erin jumped, startled. "Don't do that," she said.

Mop lifted his nose and howled once more, then lay down with his nose
between his front legs.

Erin felt little sheets of shivers running up and down her spine. She
punched in an all-direction scan, watched the screens closely. Stars and
more stars. Then, toward the core, oddly enough, a big blackness. She
punched in magnification, her heart pounding. She hadn't really expected
to find an isolated binary so near the galaxy's heart. But there they were,
two stars of equal brightness. She punched in orders. Optics whirred into
position. The twin stars were separated by 9.5 astronomical units, had an
orbital period of 44.5 years. The mass of the nearer sun was .96 of the sun
of New Earth, the star by which man measured all others. The farther star
was slightly larger in mass than the New Sun, which accounted for the fact