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

wreck.

My internal computer hypothesized that the wreck was Old Earth make, five thousand years old, maybe
older. But I was convinced that estimation was wrong.

In no way could Earthers have made it this far from their own system in a ship like that. Even if the ship
had managed to survive all this time floating like a derelict, even if there had been a reason for it to be
here, the fact remained: no Earthers had been anywhere near this region five thousand years ago.

So I ignored the computerized hypothesis, and moved my single-ship as close as I could get it to the
wreck without compromising safety measures.

Pitted and space-scored, the wreck had some kind of corrosion on the outside and occasional holes in
the hull. The thing clearly was old. And it had been floating for a very long time. Nothing lived in it, and
nothing seemed to function in it either besides that one faint energy signature, which was another sign of
age.

Any other spacer would've scanned the thing, but other spacers didn't have my priorities. I was happy
my equipment wasn't storing information. I needed to keep this wreck and its whereabouts my secret, at
least until I could explore it.

I made careful private notes to myself as to location and speed of the wreck, then went home, thinking of
nothing but what I had found the entire trip.

In the silence of my free-floating apartment, eighteen stories up on the scattered space-station wheel that
orbited Hector One Prime, I compared my eyeball scan to my extensive back-up files.

And got a jolt: the ship was not only Old Earth based, its type had a name:

It was a Dignity Vessel, designed as a stealth warship.

But no Dignity Vessel had made it out of the fifty light year radius of Earth—they weren't designed to
travel huge distances, at least by current standards, and they weren't manufactured outside of Earth's
solar system. Even drifting at the speed it was moving, it couldn't have made it to its location in five
thousand years, or even fifty thousand.

A Dignity Vessel.

Impossible, right?

And yet...

There it was. Drifting. Filled with mystery.

Filled with time.

Waiting for someone like me to figure it out.
****
The team hates my secrecy, but they understand it. They know one person's space debris is another's
treasure. And they know treasures vanish in deep space. The wrong word to the wrong person and my