"Mary Rosenblum - Breeze from the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

BREEZE FROM THE STARS
by Mary Rosenblum

Mary Rosenblum has published SF novels and short stories since 1990. She
has been a Hugo nominee and a winner of the Compton Crook Award. Mary
lives and writes on country acreage where she also trains dogs. Her novels,
Horizons from Tor Books and Water Rites from Fairwood Press, were
released this past year. You can find out more about her books at her website
[www.maryrosenblum.com]. In her new tale for us, she shows us what it
might be like to direct space traffic while experiencing the...
****
Everybody in the graduating class went to The Hole where the working jocks hung
out, up high near the hub on the NYUp orbital to celebrate ... or gripe ... when the
rock jock postings went up. Sanya and Jorges got drunk fast, they had no tolerance
to anything, and were already hooting and pushing each other around in the
near-micro-g of the tiny bar. They’d been posted as new members of NYUp’s elite
Team One. Well, they had the reflexes of rock jocks, all right. But so did he. Jeri
huddled back in the shadows, nursing a beer flavored with raspberries from the hub
gardens. Up this high, where no tourists wandered, the walls were curved, no
corners, and if you pushed a bit, you could bounce off the ceiling in the marginal
gravity. The beer seemed to rise up into his head instead of going down and he felt
drunk even after just half a bag. Not giddy, just a little disconnected from reality.
He sure wasn’t celebrating. Wasn’t sure why the hell he’d come. Jeri sucked
another mouthful of bitter raspberry brew from the bag.
“Your face says washed out.” A tall rock jock with tawny skin and a lot of
fiber light tattoo-work drifted over. “But the wash-outs do their cryin’ over in the
Blue Moon.” She put a decorated arm over his shoulder, breathed beer in his face.
“What happened? You get posted to New Singapore and you hate Islam?”
He thought about shoving her arm off, didn’t. Each tattoo meant a hit. He
studied an emerald green Celtic knot, wondering what it meant. She might have taken
out a piece of junk ... a floater, a danger to the orbital platforms or the traffic
between. It might have been a rock coming in. Might have been a pirate raider
carrying serious hardware. Rock jocks whacked whatever the dispatchers sent ‘em
to.
“I could take your mind off your bad post. Hey, you’ll feel better when
you’re out hottin’ after a rock anyway.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look at her. “Only they stuck me with a dispatch dock.
Why? I had the best hit record in our class.”
“Dispatch?” The arm withdrew. “They don’t train jocks and put ‘em on the
cans to dispatch.”
 “Good.” He drained the last of his beer. “Go tell Delfinio that, will you?”
“Delfinio? That Dispatch.” Her tone capitalized it and made him look up,
finally. She was nodding.
“When’s your birthday, kid?”
“Huh?”
“Let me guess ... somewhere between November 30 and December 17, right?”
“Yeah. December 5, so what?” He stared at her, waiting for the punch line.
“You’re an Ophiuchus. Like a Cancer or Aries, you know? The woo-woo
zodiac thing. Only it’s some weird thirteenth house.”
He didn’t get it, kept his face still, not gonna help her to trip him into the