"Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

should
have tipped me off that my perverse talent was about to do me dirty again.
Second Officer Mara Kittredge was at the command console, Tarl Fromm and Ing
Waskin were backing her up at helm and scanners, and there was absolutely no
reason why anyone else should have been needed, least of all the ship's third
officer. But I was feeling restless. We were about to come out of hyperspace
over Messenia, and I wanted to make sure this whole silly stop was handled as
quickly as possible, so I was there. I should have known better.
"Thirty seconds," Waskin was saying as I arrived. He glanced up at me, then
quickly turned back to his scanners. Probably, I figured, so that I wouldn't
see
that faintly gloating smile he undoubtedly had on his skinny face.
Kittredge looked up, too, but her smile had nothing but her normal cool
friendliness in it. She was friendly because she felt professionals should
always be polite to their inferiors; cool, because she knew all about my
career
and clearly had no intention of being too close to me when the lightning
struck
again. "Travis," she nodded. "You're a little early for your shift, aren't
you?"
"A shave, maybe," I said, drifting to her side and steadying myself on her
chair
back. She wasn't much more than half my age, but then, that was true of
nearly
everyone aboard except Captain Garrett. Bright kids, all of them. Only a few
with Kittredge's same hard-edged ambition, but all of them on the up side of
their careers nonetheless. It made me feel old. "Was that thirty seconds to
breakout?"
"Yes," she said, voice going distant as the bulk of her attention shifted
from
me to the bank of displays before her. I followed her example and turned to
watch the screens and readouts. And continued my silent grousing.
We weren't supposed to be at Messenia. We weren't, in fact, supposed to be
anywhere closer than a day's hyperdrive of the stupid damn mudball on this
particular trip. We were on or a bit ahead of schedule for a change, we had
all
the cargo a medium-sized freighter like the Volga could reasonably carry, and
all we had to do was deliver it to make the kind of medium-sized profit that
keeps pleasant smiles on the faces of freighter contractors. It should have
been
a nice, simple trip, the kind where the crew's lives alternate between
predictable chores and pleasant boredom.
Enter Waskin. Exit simplicity.
He had, Waskin informed us, an acquaintance who was supposed to be out here
with
the Messenia survey mission. We'd all heard the rumors that there were
supposed
to be outcroppings of firebrand opaline scattered across Messenia's
surface—opaline whose current market value Waskin just happened to have on
hand.