[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Then he wondered why what he had just done made him feel so unclean.
Akanah's nap lasted more than three hours, but the report from Ship
Registry had not yet arrived when she stirred. She said nothing to him
when she emerged from the sleeper, disappearing for several minutes
behind the privacy screen of the refresher unit.
When she emerged, she had forgone the more flowing, multilayered
garment she had worn on the planet for the simple, close-fitting,
long-sleeved one-piece she had worn for much of the jump to Teyr. When
she joined him at the flight controls, he caught the faint scent of the
freshener cabinet on her clothing.
"So, have we a shadow?"
"None clumsy enough to give itself away yet, anyway," Luke said.
"There are eighteen ships--make that nineteen, now--in this outbound
corridor. In theory they're all heading for the Foless Crossroads, or
for Darepp."
"In theory?"
"Under free-navigation rules, they don't have to file flight plans and
announce their destinations--they just have to announce themselves as
they leave here and when they get there."
Akanah leaned forward to study the navigational display. "How did you
make it display those identifiers?
When I was coming into Coruscant, all it showed me were those green
bars--it didn't tell me what they were."
"The display options are on the command menus.
But the basic display really tells you all you need, most of the time,"
Luke said. "A green bar means a ship that is a safe distance away on a
noncollision course. Yellow bar, a ship that's closer than the
standard spacing, but not on a collision course. Red bar, something on
an intercept course. Same rules for rocks, except the symbol is a
circle--like that one."
"So any red symbols mean danger."
Luke nodded. "I'm sure this ship has some fairly obnoxious alarms, and
collision-avoidance protocols."
"What if someone fired a missile at us? Would it show up as a red
bar?"
Frowning, Luke considered. "Probably as a circle, as though it were a
fast-moving asteroidal body. Missiles don't send out recognition
signals, and skiffs don't have threat-recognition modules in their
scanners."
"I have never been in a warship," Akanah said.
"Tell me--how does this compare with the cockpit of a military
spacecraft?"
"Oh--worlds apart," Luke said.
"How, exactly?"
"Well--in a military ship, the automated systems are there to support
the pilot--most everything that matters is done with your hands on the
controls," Luke said.
"A ship like this is designed to have the expert systems take over as
much as possible, to protect casual pilots from making mistakes."
"So there are more controls in a fighter."
"A lot more. Heck, a combat flight stick has almost as many controls
on it as there are on this whole panel," Luke said. "Most of what this
ship will let you do by yourself is buried three levels deep in the
command option displays."
She nodded. "Tell me, if we were pursued by a warship, or intercepted
by a fighter how much could you do?"
Luke ran his fingers back through his hair. "Less than you're probably
hoping," he said. "It's not a test I'd look forward to."
"Not even with your reputation as a pilot?"
"She's underpowered for realspace, which means we can't run away. She
doesn't have true vector thrus ters, which means she's not very agile,
despite her low mass. The nav shields would pop on the first hit, and
the hull would breach on the second--unless the second hit was from an
ion cannon."
"What would happen then?"
"All the systems would sizzle, and we'd be dead in space." He showed a
rueful smile. "Piloting ability doesn't count for much then. And
reputations count for even less."
"So our only hope would be to jump to hyperspace before we were hit."
"That's about the size of it."
Just then a sweet-toned signal sounded from the console, startling
Akanah. "What is it? What's that?"
"Nothing to worry about," Luke said as he leaned forward. "Incoming
hypercomm file transmission. A re port on the Star Morning. I
requested it from Coruscant while you were napping."
Her eyes flashed angrily. "I asked you to wait until we'd jumped."
"You also asked me to use my judgment," Luke said. "We can't do a
quick jump-and-go if we're sitting out there somewhere waiting for a
report to come in.
And I thought this report might have information we'd want in hand
before we commit to Atzerri."
"We're already committed to Atzerri," she said stiffly. "That's where
the scribing at Teyr told us to go."
"I want to look at the report," Luke said. "The way I see it, the more
information we have, the better."
"All it can do is mislead us," Akanah said. "I told you that we leave
no trail an outsider can follow."
Another, low-pitched tone signaled the end of the transmission.
"Then I'll count on you to keep me from getting lost," Luke said,
bringing up the secondary display panel. "You can look at this or
not--but I have to. I never have liked making decisions in the
dark."
Luke had anticipated two possible reasons for the delay in the report's
arrival--and either a very thin or a very thick file, depending on
which was to blame.
It was a thick file, almost overwhelming with detail. Star Morning,
a.k.a. Mandarin, a.k.a. Pilgrim, a.k.a. Congere, had had a long history
before passing into the hands of the Fallanassi and a busy history
since.
Built by the Koqus Design Syndic as a variation on an even older
Republic Seinar design, it was classed as a short-route liner despite
the sleeper configuration of its fifty-eight-passenger main cabin. At
forty-four meters long and twenty-eight meters across the spade-shaped
twin-deck main hull, it was readily capable of planetary landings at
even the smallest spaceports and a good pilot might even try a
dirt-field touchdown and get away with it. The hyperdrive was a rather
ordinary Block 1, with dual fusion generators. But the ion engines, a
pair of SoroSuub Viper 40s, would have been adequate for a ship with a
keel mass half again greater.
With legs like that, she could give the Falcon a run for her money,
Luke thought.
More interesting than the specifications, though, was confirmation that
Star Morning was still the property of Kell Hath Corporation of Teyr,
and had been so continuously for the past fifteen years. The port call
list for that period ran to more than two hundred entries, with no
single port appearing more than three times, and most entries unique.
You've tramped around, Luke mused as he skimmed the list. I haven't
even heard of most of these places.
The list was spotty, obviously incomplete. There were many stretches
of a month or longer--well more than the ship's rated stand-alone
endurance--with no port calls listed. But a footnote explained that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • alwayshope.keep.pl

    •