"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Diving Into The Wreck" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

to space late: fifteen years old, already land-locked. My first instructors told me I'd never unlearn the
thinking real atmosphere ingrains into the body.

They were mostly right; land pollutes me, takes out an edge that the space-raised come to naturally. I
gotta consciously choose to go into the deep and dark; the space-raised glide in like it's mother's milk.
But if I compare myself to the land-locked, I'm a spacer of the first order, someone who understands
vacuum like most understand air.

Old timers, all space-raised, tell me my interest in the past comes from being land-locked. Spacers move
on, forget what's behind them. The land-born always search for ties, thinking they'll understand better
what's before them if they understand what's behind them.

I don't think it's that simple. I've met history-oriented spacers, just like I've met land-born who're always
looking forward.

It's what you do with the knowledge you collect that matters and me, I'm always spinning mine into gold.

So, the wreck.
****
I came on it nearly a year before, traveling back from a bust I'd got suckered into with the promise of
glory. I was manually guiding my single-ship, doing a little mapping to pick up some extra money. They
say there aren't any undiscovered places anymore in this part of our galaxy, just forgotten ones, and I
think that's true.

An eyeblink is all I'd've needed to miss the wreck. I caught the faint energy signal on a sensor I kept
tuned to deep space around me. The sensor blipped once and was gone, that fast. But I had been around
enough to know that something was there. The energy signal was too far out, too faint to be anything but
lost.

As fast as I could, I dropped out of FTL, cutting my sublight speed to nothing in the drop. It still took me
two jumps and a half day of searching before I found the blip again and matched its speed and direction.

I had been right. It was a ship. A black lump against the blackness of space.

My single-ship is modified—I don't have automatic anythings in it, which can make it dangerous (the
reason single-ships are completely automatic is so that the sole inhabitant is protected), but which also
makes it completely mine. I've modified engines and the computers and the communications equipment,
so that nothing happens without my permission.

The ship isn't even linked to me, although it is set to monitor my heart rate, my respiration rate, and my
eyes. Should my heart slow, my breathing even, or my eyes close for longer than a minute, the automatic
controls take over the entire ship. Unconsciousness isn't as much of a danger as it would be if the ship
were 100 percent manual, but consciousness isn't a danger either. No one can monitor my thoughts or
my movements simply by tapping the ship's computer.

Which turned out to be a blessing because now there are no records of what I had found in the ship's
functions. Only that I had stopped.

My internal computer attached to the eyelink told me what my brain had already figured out. The wreck
had been abandoned long ago. The faint energy signal was no more than a still-running current inside the