"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 01 - Expendable" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

glowed milky white due to spontaneous creation of particles in the envelope's ergosphere. The glow
shifted to the blue end of the spectrum when the ship moved forward and to the red when the ship
reversed, but the color we saw most, the color at anchor, was that suggestive semen white.

REASON 2: The envelope bulged like the head of a spermatozoon where it surrounded the ship itself,
then tapered off into a thin tail that stretched some 15,000 kilometers to our stern. In flight, random
fluctuations of magnetic fields in space made the tail whip wildly like the tail of a swimming sperm.

REASON 3: Given time, a ship's crew will attach sexual innuendo to anything. It makes their jobs more
exciting.




Waiting in the Transport Room


When I reached the Transport Room, Lieutenant Harque was grimacing at the tracking holo and gingerly
twisting dials. Captain Prope leaned over his shoulder and blocked his light. Each time the lieutenant
ducked to one side to see more clearly, the captain moved with him like a shadow. I'd seen the routine
many times before, and Harque had never asked the captain to step back.

Vile little toady.

In the rare moments that he had a clear view of the holo, Harque was manipulating our aft
electromagnets in order to wag the tail of our Sperm. Somewhere far behind us, theGolden Cedar was
doing the same thing, with the goal of snagging one tail on the other and forcing the two to fuse into a
single continuous tube. It was a ticklish business at the best of times, and worse with a captain breathing
down your neck. The best operators in the Fleet sometimes spent more than twenty minutes at the job.
Harque was not one of the best operators in the Fleet.
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Yarrun sat against the far wall of the room, well out of everyone's way. He looked more alert now;
either he had managed to get some sleep or had forced himself awake with a cold shower, caffeine,
something. From the depths of his closet, he had rummaged up his dress blacks, as wrinkled as raisins.
Every stitch of clothing Yarrun owned was rumpled and worn; he came from a splinter culture on
Novolith with a religious stricture against vanity in one's attire.

Thanks to Explorer programming, Yarrun was just as obsessive in keeping his clothes mussed as I was
in keeping my hair parted straight.

I inflated a chair and sat down beside him. "Are they close?" I asked in a low voice.

He shrugged. "Since I arrived, the captain has shouted, 'You almost had it!' three times."

"Has she called him a fool yet?"