"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Alliances" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

the galaxy and it was, as Galland had said, dangerous even without the mines placed
in it by the Ba-am-as.
The Ba-am-as were a possessive race who claimed not only the space around their
planet, but the space around their solar system as their territory. That they shared
that space with at least seventy-five other sentient species didn’t seem to bother
them at all; that among the seventy-five were four-teen that were space-faring only
bothered the Ba-am-a“s in that they had to defend themselves.
And they did, against everyone.
To make matters worse, the Ba-am-as were more technologically advanced than the
Patrol. It meant that any space-faring ships that went into self-proclaimed Ba-am-as
territory had to be warships, and had to have a lot of maneuverability.
The Millennium had both, and normally, Roz would have felt all right going into
Ba-am-as turf with her ship, but things weren’t normal, The Millennium was
designed to run with a crew composite of three hundred. It could run well with
anything down to two hundred and, theoretically, could function with a skeleton
crew of one hundred.
Galland had allowed her the fifty crew members of her choice, promising to reassign
all the others and rebuild their careers. She was happy for them-but the problem that
she had was that to run the Millennium with half her minimal crew composite
required her to use her best people-and those were the people she most wanted out
of Galland’s clutches.
Her only other choice was to take the prototype which she trusted as much as she
trusted Galland. Better to run the Corridor with a tired overworked talented crew in
the best ship in the fleet than run it with a new ship and an unfamiliar crew.
Or so she told herself.
If there had been a way to avoid the Corridor, she would have done it. But there
wasn’t, at least, not a quick way, according to the maps she had gotten from
Galland. She would have interviewed his alien informants herself, but they had
conveniently left the base just before she arrived.
She did watch the vids of the interviews and noted that all the pertinent information
hadn’t been filmed at all. Some-one had shut off the vids at all the appropriate
moments. That meant she couldn’t even reconstruct the blacked-out vids. All she
had was Galland’s word, the crazy map, and supposition.
The interviews told her less than Galland had.
The fifth day into the nebula, the computer reported the first minefield.
The Ba-am-as were clever. The mines were impossible to detect, at least with Patrol
technology, but the Ba-am-as always issued warnings in the parameter around the
field. The warnings always ended with some Ba-am-adian dignitary expressing its
wish that no race get hurt in Ba-am-adian territory.
So considerate.
Roz had the computer do a sweep anyway. She had learned, the last time she went
through this nebula, that the Ba-am-adian mines appeared on scans as bits of rock.
Her plan was to avoid all rock as she went through.
If the Bd-am-as had changed the configuration of the mines, however, the
Millennium would get through the nebula by luck alone.
As soon as the announcement came through, Roz went to the bridge. She wasn’t the
best pilot on board, not anymore, but she was the most canny. She took the
copilot’s chair and served as backup as the ship crawled its way through the
minefield.
Fifteen agonizing hours passed. Roz suspected they were nearly out of the field