"Bud Sparhawk - Clay's Pride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sparhawk Bud)

Clay's Pride Bud Sparhawk
 Contact can be a tantalizing glimpse, and even clear facts get filtered through layers of human
deviousness. . .
The scream of the proximity alarm awoke Wilburn from his dream of the cloud-tipped

mountains of home. He slapped the panic switch to regain control from the automatics and tried to make
sense of the display. Maybe it was another chunk of debris, he hoped.

The jumbled returns from the long scan gave no indication of what was coming, only that there were
more than one and they were distributed within a 100,000-kilometer cube. Even when he boosted the
gain he still couldn’t resolve the returns into anything that made sense.

Well, that wouldn’t matter for long. At the rate the objects were closing they’d soon be in visual range.
He unlimbered the scope and adjusted it for max range. There, that bright fuzzy spot must be the target
cluster. He kept the scope fixed on the spot.

“Holy mother of God.” He could hardly believe his eyes, as the image grew swiftly larger. The cluster
appeared to be shattered icebergs, all sharp edges and random shapes. But they couldn’t possibly be
icebergs, not out in deep space. Those sharp ridges must have scattered the signal. No wonder he
couldn’t make sense of the scans. What could they be?

“Encountered some anomalous objects,” he encoded into the neutrino burst message pad. “Will transmit
a visual.” He thought for a minute and then added, “Appear to be ice shards.”

Message sent, he prepared to image the advancing objects. Strange, they looked a lot closer than he’d
initially thought. A quick check of the scan confirmed it. They were accelerating, which meant they were
under power—under control!

Realizing the importance of his sighting, he fumbled with the imager, aimed it at the largest shard, and
took a long exposure. Even though the objects appeared to be glowing he wanted to capture as much
light as possible.

The strangest thing about the resulting image was a blurry area at the lower edge, as if something had
passed between him and the larger object during the exposure time.

Wilburn just had time to glance out the port to see what it might have been when the universe exploded
around him. He floated among the wreckage of his ship, unfeeling of the ice forming in his veins, of the
gases rushing from every orifice of his body, unseeing with his frozen eyes as the shards passed him by.



Commander Simon Clay, the senior Fleet officer on board, checked the readouts from Pride’s watch
stations and made a notation in the log. Nothing to report, he wrote, as completely expected. Nothing
ever happened on these training flights.

The flight profile was always the same: They’d take a series of safe, half-light milliblinks out from Dzhou
and run a straight survey sweep for three days. At the end of the survey they’d go through twenty barely
noticeable, but more risky microblink jumps to run a second survey sweep. At the end, with only Fleet
crew at the control positions, the ship would make a couple of risky, combat-standard blinks towards
home.