"Denning, Troy - Forgotten Realms - MoonShae 3 - Darkwell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Denning Troy)

"That's it, that's it, brace for dump."
She sent it to auto; The Pride lurched half into hyperspace again and fell out with less energy-
-gods, gods, sick as a novice-What in a mahen hell's in this system? Come on, Geran. Get it sorted. O gods- At forty-five percent of Light. With the system rushing up in their faces. Their own signal going out from that traitor buoy at full Light. Themselves about to become a target for someone. She fumbled after the foil containers at her elbow, bit through one and let the salt flood chase down the nausea. There was a meeting of unpleasant tides somewhere behind the pit of her throat and her nose and hands and the folds of her body broke out in sickly sweat. "Geran. Get me id."
"Working, I'm working."
Dump fouling up the scan; nothing where it ought to be, the comp overloaded with input and trying to make positional sense out of it before it got around to analyzing ship IDs.
"Multiple signal," Hilfy said. "Nothing clear yet. Multi-species."
"Arrival," Jik said. "Moon Rising is in."
"On the mark," Haral said. "Second dump, stand by."
Taking it down fast. The pain in her chest refused to leave. The nausea all but overcame her; but she hit the control anyway-
-down again.
-Gangling figures against white light. Captain, a voice said, and Chur was there with the light shining about her, in the midst of a long black hallway, and shafts of light spearing past her as she moved in the slightest. She turned her shoulder and looked back into the light- -"Chur-"
they cycled through again, back in
realspace. And the weakness that ran through her was all-enveloping. She fought it back and groped after another of the packets. Bit into it and drank the noisome stuff down in a half dozen convulsive gulps.
"We got signal on Moon Rising," Geran's voice reached her, indistinct; she heard Tully talking, some half-drunken babble.
"Chur," he was saying. "Chur, you answer. Please you answer.''
No sound out of Chur, then. It might still be the sedative. The machine would knock her out in stress. They had plenty of it. Pyanfar blinked again, flexed her right arm in the brace, withdrew it and shoved the mechanism aside, out of her way. Her hands shook. She heard the quiet, desperate drone of Tully's alien voice: "Chur, Chur, you hear?"
While Geran battled the comp for ID they desperately needed. Mind on business.
"We got recept on Meetpoint," Hilfy said. "Lot of output. Busy in there. I'm trying to link up with our partners, get a fix on those ships-"
"We've got to keep going," she muttered. "Got to. No gods-be choice. Blind. We got our instructions, we got-"
"Kif," Skkukuk said suddenly. "Kifish output!"
"Audio two," Hilfy said.
It was. Some kifish ship was transmitting in code. Unaware of them yet, it might be. Or close enough to have picked them up, inbound from Kefk. "Going to have an intercept down our necks any minute," she muttered, and sweated. "Akkhtimakt. He's on guard here. Or he's running the whole gods-be station-"
"Image, priority," Geran said. "My gods."
Passive scan came up with resolution, a haze to this side, to that, all in differing colors indicating different vectors and slow, virtually null-movement, relative. Big hazy ball where Meetpoint ought to be. Haze to zero-ninety-minus sixty. Haze id minus seventy-thirty-sixty. Another ball out to one ten. The only thing that made sense was the Given in the system, the Meetpoint Mass itself, big and dark and dead from its cons-old formation. And the station itself. The rest-
"Khym," Pyanfar snapped. "Interior com. Tully! audio one. Listen sharp. We don't know what we've got here. Could be humans, could be anything. Whatever we got, it's a lot of it."
"Got it," Khym said; and: "Got," from Tully.
The comp main panel between Haral and Hilfy was a steady flicker of inter-partition queries and action from this and that side of its complex time-sharing lobes. Like the lunatic tc'a: it had several minds to make up, and they were all busy.
She rubbed her chest where the pain had settled and swiped the back of the same hand across an itch on her nose.
And listened to Khym trying over and over again to raise Chur on the com.
"Chur," he cried suddenly. "Geran-I got her, she's answering! Chur, how are you?"
She was alive back there. Someone switched Chur's answer through. It was scatologically obscene.
Pyanfar drew one painful breath and another.
"Thank the gods," Haral murmured in a low voice. And from Khym: "Ker Chur, we have a problem just now-"
"That's stsho," Hilfy said. "I'm picking up something near the station. Stsho. And hani. More than one. You got data coming, Geran, Jik.-I hear that." To someone on com. And Geran:
"Gods rot it, I'm working." Then: "Yeah, just take it easy, hear?"
"I got," Jik said quietly. "They be here they don't-"
"Ten minutes station AOS," Haral said. "Mark."
Pyanfar drew another breath and flexed her hands. "Hilfy, output to Meetpoint traffic control: coming in on standard approach."
"Aye, done, standard approach data in transmission."
"Aja Jin make dump," Jik said.
"Stand by our final."
The wavefront of their arrival had not yet gotten to Meetpoint central. The robotic beacon in the jump range knew as much as its AI brain was capable of knowing anything; but the buoy was not communicating data back to them even after it had had time to receive their ID squeal.
It was certain that it was a trap. Stsho had no nerve sufficient to antagonize an armed enemy, blinding them as they came in. It was what they hired guards to do.
"No telling where Sikkukkut is," Pyanfar muttered. "It'd take him maybe another hour to get that lot away from Kefk. But he's fast."
"Kkkkt," Skkukuk said, which sound sent the hair up on her back. Not a comment except that click which meant a thousand things. "You all right back there: Skkukuk, you all right?" she asked the kif. And deliberately pleased the bastard. It was a genuine question; nourishment for him was a problem. No gods-be little vermin on my bridge, was her ultimatum; and Skkukuk had come up with his own answer. Straight simple-sugars and water, into a vein.
"Kkkkt," he said again. "Yes, hakt'." Doubtless coming to a whole array of mistaken kifish conclusions about his status, the crew's, Jik's and Tully's; that elongate, predatory brain was set up to process that kind of information constantly, inexorable as a star in its course. Claw and crawl and climb. With a sense of humor only when it was in the ascendancy and demonstrating its power.
Creator Gods, if You made that, You must've had something in mind. But what?
"Imaging," Tirun said; "priority channel four."
"Your two," Haral said; but that change was already there, the hazy ball of Meetpoint separating into a whole globe of points. So did one of the other patches of haze. Another remained indistinct.
"We got a lot of company," Haral said.