"Zach Hughes - Gold Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

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Gold Star by Zach Hughes
Chapter One

Peter Jaynes came from deep sleep into instant alertness. He lay on his
back, his eyes looking upward toward the planetside landscape which Jan
had programmed into the decopanel on the bulkhead over the bed. The
subconscious memory of a sound was just beyond his reach. He lifted his
head from the pillow, was very still. The only thing he heard was Jan's
deep, even breathing. He sighed, let his neck relax, and put out his hand to
the heated softness of a rounded hip.

He decided that he'd dreamed a sound. He turned and put one arm
across Jan. She slept in the same garment she'd been wearing during the
last wake period, a silken singlet. There was no need for formality on a
deep-space tug crewed by man and wife.

The tantalizing near-memory of having been awakened by something
continued to nag at him. He closed his eyes but did not feel sleepy. He
turned onto his back again. The landscape overhead had changed to show
a Tigian sky over hard, red, rocky hills. It had rained and a rainbow arced
the dome of blue. He was not going to be able to get back to sleep.

"Come on, legs," he said aloud. Legs heard and obeyed, swung off the
bed. Jan stirred, but did not awaken. He checked the wall chronometer.
He was only halfway through the sleep period, which accounted for his
slight feeling of grogginess.

He stepped into the shower. Cold, stinging, refreshing water penetrated
the singlet he wore. He shook his head and sent droplets flying, cut off the
water, stood with his eyes closed as a warm breeze from an ecologically
pure desert dried him.
 The Stranden 47, Mule Class space tug, registered out of New Earth,
was over two hundred light-years from the nearest populated planet. You
didn't just ignore sounds, sounds so unusual that they woke you up, when
you were that far from nowhere.

A deep-space blink ship of any class was no place for odd sounds.
Aboard any blinker things hummed, purred, clicked, bleeped, whistled,
but each sound indicated perfect order, perfectly functioning hardware.
An unusual sound usually meant that something had gone wrong in one of
a couple of hundred thousand servomechanisms. A Mule Class tug had
backup systems for backup systems, but the loss of any one system was a