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

that, even though it was more distant, it had the same apparent
brightness as the nearer star. The nearer star was sterile, alone in its
assigned volume of space. The other had whelped.

She had to make a short Blink to get near enough for the ship's
instruments to pick up the family of planets circling the more distant,
larger star.
 So far everything on the chart was checking out. She put the Mother
Lode on flux and, while she gathered data and recharged the generator,
had a bath, gave Moppy one—much to his disgust—dried her hair and his
with a blower, and then held Moppy up to the viewer to show him the
sights. The ship flew past two uninhabitable planets, one a frozen ball of
ice, the other a gas giant.

"Well, my boy," she told Mop, "it's just the way Dad's old buddy said it
was."

She felt herself becoming just a bit excited as Mother neared her
destination. She was quite close, astronomically speaking, before Mother's
sensors could pick up the belt of asteroids located roughly in what would
have been the star's life zone. Beyond the asteroid belt were two small
bodies, one not much larger than a respectable moon, orbiting so close to
the sun that they were nothing more than scorched rock.

Not all life zone planets were number three planets, but most were.
Once, apparently, this sun had had a third planet, a world positioned in
that relatively narrow, highly critical area just close enough to a sun to
condense water, not close enough for the water to boil away, and not far
enough away for the water to freeze permanently.

Now, in the orbit of the third planet, the ship's instruments picked up a
band of rubble. The jumble of rocks extended far and away, curving in
both directions, making a ring of space rubbish all around the sun. She let
the ship fall closer, whistled when the optics showed that it was really
crowded in there, that the chunks of rock, asteroids large and small, were
so close together that maneuvering among them was going to be, at best,
thrilling. She gave the ship directions. Gyros whined. The ship turned
slowly, taking up an orbit parallel to and at a safe distance from the
asteroid belt.

She jumped when Mother's detectors pinged a warning, but before she
could act a chunk of rock the size of an interplanetary freighter rolled past
not over a half mile away. The tumbling asteroid didn't make a roar of
threat, as debris sometimes did in the more amateurish space operas, but
even without sound it was menacing enough to send Erin scampering to
the controls to put more distance between her and the belt.

She had a good sleep before approaching the asteroids again. Then,
heart pounding, she turned the ship's detectors to maximum power and
upped Mother's speed a bit. She zapped in close to the belt, holding her