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

Galaxy around the rim of the disc's horizontal plane. She had been built to
do the job, and she had done it well. In one expedition she had accelerated
galactic exploration enormously, for now a ship could follow her beacons
to a position opposite any given point in the galactic disk and begin
exploratory penetration at a point which would have taken years to reach
if it had been necessary to pick a laborious path between the stars.

Rimfire's long and lonely voyage was important because of the nature
of the blink drive. Even in the crowded heart of the galaxy, distances were
measured in light-years and parsecs. There was, of course, more space
than matter, but a blinking ship had to avoid all material objects during
its period of semi-nonexistence while blinking. In the two known instances
where a blinking ship had made contact with another object while in a
state of transition a process of molecular breakdown had welded the two
objects into one solidity. Therefore, when traveling in unexplored space, a
ship was limited to blinks only as great as the distance that could be
surveyed by her instruments and predetermined to be free of stars,
planets, asteroids, or particularly dense clouds of space dust.

After Rimfire's voyage, a ship could travel outside the galactic plane
and reach a point on the other side of the galaxy faster than she could
travel in a more or less straight line between the stars. The distances were
greater via the out-galaxy routes, but a blinking ship covered a jump of a
thousand parsecs as quickly as one measuring half an astronomical unit.

Captain Julie Roberts was right in guessing that the ceremonies would
be time consuming. By the time Rimfire had been saluted, orated to,
honored, and boarded by an assortment of brass including the elected
president of the United Planets, Erin Kenner had been off watch, had
eaten, slept, showered, watched a few hours of programming from
Xanthos to catch up on what had been going on in the inhabited areas of
the galaxy, and was pulling another watch on the navigation bridge.

The ship was at orbital secure, her drive systems down, the big blink
generator humming quietly at a power setting sufficient to keep the flux
drive active and to provide electrical power and three-quarters New Earth
Standard Gravity. The brass had departed. The ship's shuttles were
dropping away and flashing down planetside, each of them packed to the
maximum with the lucky ones who had drawn first liberty.

Erin leaned back in the command chair, her long legs propped up.
Maintenance hadn't touched up the paint on the console in recent months.
Two worn spots in the U.P. issue gray showed that Erin wasn't the only
one who assumed a casual posture while on post. She was dressed in X&A
shipboard duty wear which consisted of neatly cut blue shorts,
comfortable white overshirt, and flesh-tone hose. On her ash-blonde hair
perched the little go-to-hell spacer's cap. Her badges of rank and station
were embossed on the cap and on the shoulders of her shirt, Navigator
First Class, Lieutenant of the X&A Space Arm. Over her right breast was
her blue and gold nameplate. Over the left the logo of Rimfire. She was a