"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

"Rimfire, Xanthos Central. Captain Roberts, you will bring your ship to
the assigned position to enter orbit and to receive a salute from units of
the fleet."

"Damn," Julie Roberts said. She looked at Erin Kenner and shook her
head. "Well, Lieutenant, there goes our plan to have dinner planetside."

Erin used power to augment the gravitation of the planet, let Rimfire
fall slowly. In the engineering spaces the largest blink generator ever
constructed was doing its eerie thing, drawing a combination of radiative,
electromagnetic, and gravitational forces from the nearest star. Under
Erin's skillful control the ship rotated neatly around a ninety degree turn,
adjusted speed, cut back power.

"Nicely done, Erin," Julie Roberts said. "I'm going to be sorry to lose
you."

"I'll miss this part of it," Erin said. "I'll never be able to play with so big
and expensive a toy again."

Ahead and to the sides the evenly positioned ships of the X&A fleet
glowed like giant fireflies as all external lights were turned on at the same
instant. For hundreds of miles in front of Rimfire space flares filled the
empty blackness with pyrotechnic display.

"All hands, all hands," Julie Roberts said, after turning on the in-ship
communicators, "check your nearest viewer. I do believe that we're being
welcomed home."
 Rimfire's swim through space seemed to those in the ships who were
greeting her to be slow, although the velocity of the entire armada was
high enough to balance the planet's gravitational pull against the effect of
the first law of motion. Signal lights blinked out the ancient visual code of
welcome. Fleet Admiral Flying Bird, a Healer from Old Earth and
commander of the space arm of the Department of Exploration and Alien
Search, spoke briefly to the officers and crew of Rimfire. His voice echoed
throughout the giant ship. Men and women who wanted nothing more at
the moment than to get off the ship winked at each other as if to shrug off
the admiral's sincere praise.

"Ah, shucks, Admiral," Erin Kenner said, "t'weren't nothin'."

All Rimfire had done was to circumnavigate the galaxy.

Just under six years ago she'd blinked away from Xanthos toward the
periphery, leaving behind the last, scattered stars and entering the black
void of intergalactic space. As she did the exploration crawl, traveling only
instrument-scan distances in any one jump of her powerful generator, she
left behind her a string of blink beacons that would allow others to do in
weeks what had taken her years to accomplish, to circle the Milky Way