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

Pete had deliberately chosen an isolated, seldom-visited outpost in
nowhere. There wouldn't be many signals of any sort in the three years of
their duty there.

Pete liked tug duty. At first he'd been concerned about Jan's reaction to
prolonged isolation. Theirs, as the trite old saying went, was not exactly a
marriage made in heaven. He had had one hell of a time persuading her to
marry him. The first time he saw her in the Spacer's Rest on Tigian she'd
called him a loser. He didn't deny it, but he did have enough self-image to
go back. He paid the usual exorbitant prices charged by such places as the
Spacer's Rest just to spend time with her. What he did with that time
surprised Jan. He used the time for talking. That was not what she was
usually paid to do. The Spacer's Rest, tastefully furnished, serving the
finest foods from a hundred planets, was not a place for rest and
relaxation. It was a whorehouse.

Pete looked back on those nights in the Spacer's Rest now and then
with a certain nostalgia. There they were, one loser with a hole in his head,
a dent in his skull, some brain cells forever destroyed by the injury, just
enough to ruin hell out of Peter Jaynes deductive reasoning. Without that
ability, passing the exams in his last year at the Academy was impossible.
The Academy was sorry as all hell, for, after all, the injury to Pete's brain
had come as the result of school activity. An escape hatch had blown on
the training ship, and the resulting explosive decompression had sent
Cadet Jaynes into space, with a quick blow to the head as he passed
through the hatch. They said he was lucky. He was in space with air
leaking from his ruptured helmet.

Well, perhaps, he admitted, he was lucky to be alive, to have been
picked up before the pressure inside the suit was low enough to boil his
blood. And everyone was sorry as hell that the Service demanded that a
space officer have all his brains. You just didn't fly a sleek fleet liner, or a
fleet freighter, much less an X&A Explorer Class or a ship of the line if a
little chunk of brain didn't function.

But there was another loser at the Spacer's Rest. She was a tall, blond,
female loser, a New Earther a long way from home. She had worked hard
to save the fare out to Tigian in order to study art on that planet most
famous for its artists. She had butted nose-on into Tigian snobbery. To a
Tigian, there was no such thing as a non-Tigian artist.

A work permit? Sorry, it just wasn't done. Non-Tigians were not issued
work permits. A way home? Sorry. The fleet had just been put under a new
directive. There would be no more casuals aboard ship. Too many fleet
officers had been taking advantage of the system, which had allowed
working passage to selected individuals. Most of the selected individuals
were, it seemed, rather attractive girls, many of them on holiday from
such places as the Spacer's Rest on Tigian. It wasn't good for morale for
the officers to have their own private women on board. All fleet employees,
even casual, had to have at least two years of space training at an