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

when the search found a dead ship, gutted by internal explosion, but even
the dead ships were found. There were some old stories from the last war,
a thousand years old, about ships disappearing, but that was war. It's
difficult to find the disassembled atoms of a ship which has been caught
in the full blast of a rebinder beam.

Pete's guess was that whatever had happened to Rimfire, it was
damned serious. It saddened him. He'd never seen her, but he'd seen
pictures of her, and she was one beautiful hunk of stuff.

"Jan, she's lost all power. If she had auxiliary power we'd be hearing
from her. She's out there somewhere between 794 and 793." He didn't add
that there might be people still alive on her, people who were waiting and
praying for a tug.

He made up his mind. "Send this to Stranden. Stranden 47 blinking
NE794 to begin search."

He didn't bother to wait for an answer. The 47 ceased to exist and
reexisted near the beacon from which he'd taken the tape reading twelve
hours previously. He activated the optics and detections instruments and
read the straight-line route toward New Earth as far as his instruments
could penetrate. Emptiness.

Parsecs of space lay ahead between NE794 and NE793. The search
pattern would be tedious, tiring. He started it. A short leap, just to the
point where the 47's detection instruments could read backward and
forward and, in a large number of short, jerky blinks, search every mile,
every inch, every light-year of the long, long parsecs of that long, long
jump out near the rim of the galaxy.

He put the computer to work to figure out how long it would take, and
his heart sank when he had the answer. He didn't communicate his doubt
to Jan.

The generator was building charge constantly now, and it was possible
to make jumps within seconds of emerging, giving the instruments only
time to search the cold emptiness before pushing the button. When the
generator was drained completely by the multiple small jumps, a longer
period of waiting was necessary.

Lord, Lord, he thought, if we can find her.
 If he found her and locked onto her and took her back to New Earth
with the crew dead or alive, oh, Lord. The way she was built, the way she
was equipped, she had cost billions. Even after the owners of the 47 took
the lion's share of the salvage percentage there'd be, hell, millions. There'd
be enough to make Mr. and Mrs. Peter Jaynes very, very wealthy.

It made him feel queasy in the stomach to think of the Rimfire's crew
being dead. He dreamed a dream as the long hours went by and he