"Sharon Green - Diana Santee 2 - Gateway To Xanadu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Sharon)

door, then followed the pretty blue lines until it was time to leave them and the tunnels behind. Tildor
showed briefly in my screens, barely noticed in the midst of the departure question-and-answer routine I
was involved in with the computer, and then it was a good distance behind us, its moons no longer even
visible. I stayed at the board until the entire solar system was behind us, then got out of the pilot's chair
to stretch. Everything from then on until destination-barring emergencies-was automatic, and I was free
to play passenger.

I dropped off my empty mug in the galley on my way to the salon, plopped down on the nearer of the
two couches, put my feet up as I lay back, then closed my eyes. Although it hadn't seemed like it while it
was happening, the departure from Dameron's moon base had taken better than three hours, including
the time it took to clear the solar system. Under normal circumstances everything after rising from the
surface of the moon would have been handled by the computer, leaving me free to watch, worry, or even
walk away, but I'd had a private project that needed programming, that had to be done then or not at all.
I'd gone through a lot waiting for Dameron to program my course computer, and even with Phalsyn's
papers handed over for delivery, I still hadn't been allowed to watch the course and quadrant data being
fed in. To say I'd been annoyed would be to say the sayer didn't know me; I usually prefer getting even
to getting mad. I'd asked the main computer to rig up a double-check tape run on its less intelligent
cousin the course computer, and had waited and watched to see if the run did what I wanted it to. We
were just at the fringes of Tildor's system when the double check clicked in, running a ninety-second-lag
playback of where we'd just been. I couldn't copy the set-in course without purging the entire program,
but there was nothing to keep me from recording where I'd been-up to and including the time of my
arrival at destination. All I'd have to do at that point would be to reverse the run tape, and the
breadcrumb trail leading back to Dameron's base would be in my hot little hand. I might never need it,
but it never hurts to hedge your

"All finished with starting us on our way?" a voice asked abruptly, startling me half up off the couch
before I realized it was Val, speaking the Federation Basic he'd been given, most likely for practice. I
wasn't used to having company on that ship, and settling back into old habits had nearly given me heart
failure at the first of his words.



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"Don't do that," I grumbled at him where he stood by the second couch, about five feet away, then sank
back down to sitting on my own couch. "Just until I get used to having someone else aboard, I'd
appreciate it if you stomped or sang or in some other manner made your presence known before you
came into a room where I was. If you don't, I'm not going to last very long."

"From the way you came up off that couch, I don't think you're the one we have to worry about," Val
came back, his voice dry, his deep black eyes looking down at me where I sat. "You would have ended
up facing away from me if you hadn't stopped yourself, and I have a feeling that would have been only
part of the move. What comes after that?"

"Oh, just a little screaming, a little jumping, nothing very special," I answered with a gesture of
dismissal, smiling some to distract him. Telling him he'd almost been the proud possessor of a reverse
crescent kick followed by a roundhouse kick, both to the face and head, would have probably started
another argument; Val had already run into a couple of my offensive techniques, and hadn't liked them
much.