"GRAF, L. A - STAR TREK ROUGH TRAILS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Graf L A)

Baldwin set down the canteen and reached out to steady the cargo
manifest dangling near the hatch door, squinting at its dust-fuzzed
display panel. "Four go to Desert Station. Everyone else gets two or
three."

"Okay." Reddy paused, caught up in some piloting duty, and Chekov felt
the subliminal shift in mass that meant they'd changed heading without
slowing down. "Hold out one from the Desert Station drop. They'll
have to make do with three."

"Sedlak isn't gonna like us changing the manifest like that"' Baldwin
warned.

Invoking the continental governor's name injected a startling level of
annoyance into Reddy's voice. "Sed lak isn't here. We've got an extra
drop on the list for the northeast side of Bull's Eye-a group of
herders who got stranded by the storm."

"What the hell were they doing out on a day like this?" But Plottel
was already scrubbing at his goggles to clear them, getting set for
another round of labor. " They went out three days ago, before the
dust got so bad. The ranch they're attached to didn't get word down to
Eau Claire until yesterday, and the spaceport wasn't able to punch
through the dust to the orbital platform until just now. Otherwise, we
could've just put additional shipments aboard." The speaker snapped,
nearly drowning out Reddy's grumbling sigh. "Now we're going to have
to shortchange somebody. It might as well be Desert Station' "

Ironically, if a Starfleet officer had made the same suggestion, there
would have followed ten minutes of defensive resistance before any
action could occur. As it was, Baldwin and Plotter started untangling
their safety harnesses while Chekov was still stealing a single swallow
of water from Baldwin's abandoned canteen.

"Is there any way to contact Eau Claire?" Chekov asked as he scooped
his own harness up off the filthy deck. He'd given Uhura the original
arrival time, and didn't want to leave her pacing the spaceport,
wondering what had become of him.

"Don't worry about Eau Claire-they're used to this." Plotter was
either trying to reassure him, or head off any fretting before it
began. '-The spaceport won't even consider us late until we're three
hours past our scheduled ETA."

Chekov repressed a sigh. "It wasn't the spaceport I was worried
about," he said, but without much expectation of being listened to"Is
there any way to contact anyone on the planet?" " "Fraid not," Baldwin
said, wrenching the hatch open on the sea of roiling dust outside.
"Nothing gets through that dust out there, not unless it's failing
through." His grin was wide enough to see around the edge of his dust