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

she wanted to be.

She started loading gold-rich ore. It was picky work. First the areas
containing gold had to be searched out by instrument, then Mother had to
be positioned. The ship couldn't sit on a needle point of rock, so some very
rich sounding areas had to be bypassed in order to find a fairly flat
landing place. Moving in and out of the tumbling, crowded asteroid belt
ceased to be so thrilling she could hardly stand it and came to be just
spine-tinglingly terrifying.

She'd been working for just under a month when she decided to scout
around a bit before attaching the ship to another asteroid. She circled the
sun in an orbit outside the belt. The density of the belt was about equal all
the way around. She saw chunks that were large enough to make fairly
respectable moons for a small planet. She had forgotten her loneliness. She
had her work. She had very good company. Mop was not demanding. He
fed and watered himself by pushing on his Mop buttons at his station. He
had been trained to use an ingenious little pad in the exercise room that
broke his body wastes down into recyclable liquids immediately and
pulled the smells in behind them. He didn't talk a lot. In fact, except for
that meaningful grunt which said, "Please, Erin, rub my belly," he'd been
silent since his disturbed howling had chilled Erin.

On the opposite side of the orbital ring of debris she jockeyed Mother
down onto a flat surface, stabilized the tumble, put out the extractor arm,
and began to load ore that was the richest she'd seen since the first day.
The detectors were humming merrily about gold and she was humming a
little song that had been rewritten with some rather ribald lyrics by the
junior officers aboard Rimfire. She was just about ready to knock off for
the day when there was a clear tone, a vibrant, piercing tone that jerked
her to attention. She stopped the movement of the arm and focused a
viewer on the biter at the end. The vibrant, piercing tone of alert
continued to sing in her ears. She saw something a bit lighter in color
than the gold bearing rock, reached back to kill the foreign object alert,
turned on a powerful light, lowered the viewer until its nozzle almost
touched the biter at the end of the extractor arm.

"Woah," she whispered.

All around her was the vacuum of space, the coldness and emptiness,
the uncaring, glaring stars. The nearest planet, a bit larger than New
Earth, was a chemical swamp with surface temperatures hot enough to
ignite paper, if there'd been any oxygen in the poisonous atmosphere.
Nearer the sun were the two cinder planets, lifeless rock baked by the solar
storms. Far away, out past the chemical swamp planet, was a frozen,
airless ball of ice. And at the tip of the excavator arm, still half encased in
the matrix rock, was a fossilized skull, a skull that looked up at her with
dark, eyeless sockets, a skull that had to be incredibly ancient, and was
very damned definitely humanoid.