"Zach Hughes - Gold Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

She was the most expensive ship ever built. She had every piece of
equipment known to man. She could chart new routes in space, discover
new planets; she had on board the equipment to analyze every aspect of
that new planet and, in the unlikely event of life, hostile life, she was
armed with weapons which could reduce a world to charred cinders in
seconds.

Pete couldn't even estimate her worth, but he had a glowing feeling as
his dream grew. The crew's share of a salvage on Rimfire would be the
single biggest haul ever made. He started punching buttons. He wouldn't
reveal the dream to Jan. Not yet. No use raising her hopes until he had a
more solid handle on the situation.

But Rimfire was lost. Out there between the 47 and the first beacon
down the New Earth range were a few parsecs of empty space. Past that
one, NE 794, a few more parsecs, and Rimfire's last known position near
NE793.

"Jan," he said, "send a stat to Stranden on Tigian. Keep it simple. Just
say Stranden 47 asks permission begin search Rimfire."

Jan had learned fast. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The tiny
amount of energy required to send a signal allowed almost instantaneous
relay down the Tigian range. The answer was clicking off the printer
within a minute.

"They say hold," Jan said. "Must confirm Rimfire in trouble."

Pete used one of his infrequent profanities, then shook his head. "If she
wasn't in trouble she wouldn't have disappeared."

If it was simple trouble, such as merely falling out of blink drive before
arriving at NE 794, somewhere in those parsecs of empty space between
beacons, her communications generator was enough to send a call for
help. Pete knew the space regulations. No skipper would be silent if his
ship was in trouble. If he had a way to yell for help, he'd be yelling loud
and clear. If anyone was alive on Rimfire and if the communications
equipment was working, there'd be a call going both ways down the New
Earth range.

The blink was a relatively safe way to travel, but when man depends on
hardware and electronics, he is vulnerable. Hardware and electronics fail.
The results, to a blink ship, are not always tragic, or fatal. Sometimes a
generator just lost power for one reason or another and dropped the ship
out of subspace, or wherever a ship went when blinking, back into normal
space a long, long way from anywhere.

There were no mysteries in space travel. When a ship failed to arrive,
and didn't report, a search always found her. There'd been a few times