"Malcolm Beckett - Protectors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Beckett Malcolm)

She seemed serious. This woman whom he had loved for aye and aye had thought he would not care that she was vomiting blood.
In response, he just smiled.
"Okay, I remember. I think." Willa's voice was still slow and weak, but there was a smile he hadn't seen in years. How many years? He was afraid to count.
And for the first time in an age, the proximity-alarm sounded.
He was at his command-post seconds before he realized that she would not be at hers -- and then she was.
"You can't work like that."
"Why not? I can screw like this. Captain." But the force of hatred in her voice was not quite what it had been. There was a soft edge of...something else he'd almost forgotten.
"Give me a reading on the alarming object, Crew. If you still remember how."
"Wait...two of them. One coming from the silver one we hit, and the other...." She burst into laughter that had to be hysterical. "Christ, Albie, it's our fucking relief! We forgot."
Every two years there was supposed to be a relief of all crews. They'd missed the last one. Or it had never come. Collision-protection was considered necessary. Protection crews were not. They had been expended, they'd feared, but had gone on working anyway.
"Which is closer?"
"The bogey, of course. What the Hell did you expect of Command -- efficiency and good timing, too?"
"We once had better timing than we have now."
She looked at the speaker his voice had come from in amazement. Then, softly, "We did, yes."
"Okay, give me the numbers. What's the bogey, and when does it get here?"
"Dunno what it is. Collision in...thirty hours and a bit."
"And the relief?"
"Forty. What else?"
He laughed. She remembered that laugh. Not too long before, he had laughed it when they met their first target together. An eon ago. but she smiled.
"We could do this job once, Honey." It was his turn to look astonished, but he, too, refrained from comment.
Then, "Captain Simps?"
"What?" Suspicious, he allowed no trace of emotion into his tone.
"Two things. One, the bogey just altered its course. Two, Merry Christmas."
That they had been spaced on Boxing-Day, and that that was their `anniversary' as a team was a yearly joke, but she sounded as though she meant it, for a change.
"Thank you, Willa." The message sank in. "Changed its course? What the fuck do you mean, changed its course? No natural object can do that."
"Merry Christmas, Captain."
And, once again, they were laughing together. The hopeless timing of the fruition of their earliest dream together was..silly enough that they both saw the joke at the same time. Another small miracle of recovered intimacy.
For the human race, all contacts had become dangerous ones. Two huge asteroid-strikes in two decades had created a sterling Protection Service. Five decades of nothing special had ruined it. Their own dream, the crew of *Crom*, had been to make Contact. And they would. Disastrously and explosively, probably. After all, they had fired first.
"You think there was intelligence in there?" asked the (for now) Captain.
"How else would this thing be headed for us?"
"Fragmentation...misplaced charge in our missile...asymmetrical explosion...I dunno. You think there's somebody inside...that?"
"Want to wait and find out?"
Decades of Service discipline said, "*No.*" Albet, on an impulse he never fully understood, said, with considerable surprise i his voice, "You know...I think I do. We'll hod our fire."
It was the first non-reflexive decision he had ever made as a member of the Service. Another generation would have called it a Command Decision. Willa, sick and relying on the teachings of a decimated society, called it crazy.
She turned a paler shade, and made a decision of her own.
"Captain Simps. As a senior officer of Protection, I declare to you that I have perceived in your behavior variations from the teachings and Standing Orders of the Service which force and permit me to relieve you of command. I relieve you, Sir." She looked as astonished as did Albet at her words.
"I note your finding, Crew Mant, and it is logged. Where is another officer who will confirm or refute your conclusion." For it took two.
"There is no such officer aboard. I therefore respectfully request that I be allowed to contact the relief vessel closing on us now, to seek advice and another qualified opinion in this matter."
"Regretfully, Crew, I inform you that I have declared radio- silence due to the proximity of possibly-intelligent beings who might be a danger to the Service, and who might interpret your message as a sign that the Earth and the Service are not prepared to meet them on equal or better terms. Denied."
She stared at him. "Where the hell would they have learned to speak Inglis?"
"Hypothetically, for broadcasts on frequencies such as the one you proposed to use."
"That's...crazy, Albet. You are mad."
An hour later, it had been reduced to a slanging-match, and neither sounded in the least like an officer of any sort of Service.
"There could be life in there! Who the Hell do you think you are, Willa, to decide that people, of our race or not, should die?"
"If you were thinking at all with that pea-sized ganglion you call a brain, you'd see that A) there is no intelligence out there, and that, B) if there is, *it's retaliating!* Albet, we shot first!"
And an hour after that the Crew had cornered the Captain in behind the steel bulkhead that separated the tiny Navigation chamber from the rest of the vessel with a long carving knife in her hand, and the Captain was defending himself with clever defensive swings of a heavy skillet, and occasionally managing an offensive move or two as well.
There was a standoff. Willa could not get to the radio or firing-post, and Albet couldn't stop her any more permanently than he already had. They only had one knife, and he was looking at the wrong end of it.
For the next eight hours, their course went unmonitored, their radio unmanned and their navigational observations unmade. Then Albet got to the radio during a series of yo-yo manoeuvres up and down the narrow tube of the ship. When he also made a destructive raid into the wiring of the firing-mechanism of the missile tube, he had, in effect, won.
"Captain Mant. I stand relieved." He was two days early, but what the hell.
And the new Captain, though she order him a thousand times into quarters-arrest; though she handcuff him to the outer airlock door and vent the air, would be able to do no more than that. The first mutiny in the history of the Service (or can a Captain mutiny?) had achieved its objective.