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

She felt stiff and heavy as she stepped out of the hatch onto the ship's
ladder. She could never get enough oxygen into her lungs while she was
imprisoned inside a flexsuit. The feeling of being slowly suffocated was
psychological, for the air mixture in the suit was richer than that aboard
ship. She halted for a moment before turning around to adjust the tool kit
strapped to her back. The hatch started to close behind her. She did not
hear it, of course, but she felt the slight vibration of its movement coming
up through her boots. She turned and was mesmerized as the opening
narrowed. When the crack closed and the hatch snugged itself into its seal,
she felt panic.

What if?

What if the hatch lock didn't respond to her instructions when she was
ready to go back into the ship? She had only a few hours of air. With the
oxygen gone, she would never decay. She would be held on the surface of
the asteroid by the field of the ship's generator until, perhaps years from
now, the generator used up its full charge and cooled. Would she then drift
away from the rock to tumble free in her own eternal orbit around an alien
sun?

She had performed extravehicular work before, but never alone. There
had been times when teams of crewmen in suits had swarmed over the
outside hide of Rimfire to check her condition, but each man had been
teamed with another. Every spacer who had faced the void knew the
devastating effect of looking at the big empty through an impossibly frail
faceplate from the doubtful security of a flexsuit. It was S.O.P. to never,
never, send a man outside the ship without a buddy.

There near the core, with legions, hoards, multitudes of brilliant stars
surrounding her, she felt more isolated than she had felt while space
walking in the nothingness outside the galaxy when she had to look in one
direction to see the misty mass of the Milky Way, when there was nothing
but blankness on three sides.

She was dwarfed. She felt as if she were being infinitely diminished.
She turned and with a shaking hand punched the entry combination into
the lock. The hatch began to open. She took a deep breath and let it out,
canceled the open order, turned her face up toward the viewport in the
control room. She saw the shaggy face of Mop. His sharp nose and alert
eyes followed her movement as she climbed down the ladder. She waved
and said, "Hold the fort, buddy. I'll be back before you know it."

The Mother Lode was in harsh sunlight. The surface of the asteroid was
not level so that the ship seemed to be tilted. From the inside the lopsided
stance had not mattered, since the reference for the senses was the ship's
own gravity which made her deck down regardless of her position.
Standing outside, the breath of the nuclear furnace that was the nearest
star raising the temperature on the surface of her suit, Erin felt