"Maxine McArthur - Time Future" - читать интересную книгу автора (McArthur Maxine)

tentative standoff between two or three huge trading conglomerates that
maintained mercenary fleets and acted in the interests of different
factions on the Confederacy Council, and the Danadan, a spacefaring
race who have traditionally pirated this area of space after their
homework! was destroyed by the Tor centuries ago. As well as these
major players, there were a number of small, unaligned trading
companies, and pirate gangs, all of whom jealously guarded their right
to plunder what they could of this isolated and resource-poor
cluster.
Then the Confederacy decided to "give" the station to Earth. It was a
generous gesture for the Council to approve administration of a sector
facility by one of its minor members, and none of the eight other
non-jump species had ever been accorded a similar honor. A gesture it
remained, however. The four founding member species--the Invidi, the
Q'Chn, Melot, and the Bendarl, the "Four Worlds"--have always refused
to allow the lesser members independent use of faster-than-light space
drive so Earth was forced to bow to the schedules of Sector vessels or
rent private shipping to transport its personnel and sublight ships to
the station. Without this cooperation we are completely isolated.

I arrived here as one of the engineering crew in the second year of the
reconstruction and the year before Jocasta officially became an
Earthstation. It wasn't my first job as overseer but the others had
never been as chaotic as this. Work was constantly disrupted by the
non-arrival of supplies and personnel, booby traps left by the Tor, and
occasionally by attacks on the station itself. We only ever finished
because the Danadan became embroiled in territorial squabbles with the
Seouras and the other two largest pirate fleets engaged in a bloody
feud for nearly a year. Even then, the outermost ring was still
incomplete at the inauguration ceremony. Relations with Sector Central
were further soured by difficulties in getting the station running
smoothly. There were four station heads in that first year: one quit,
two committed suicide and one was poisoned. By the time I found myself
the unwilling and ostensibly temporary holder of that office, as head
of Engineering and the most senior Con Fleet officer, most of the
construction crews
and Con Fleet forces had pulled out. No respectable trader would come
anywhere near the station--many didn't know we existed--and to cap it
all, it seemed that Jocasta's charter stated that the head of station
was also obliged to act as governor of the Abelar system. This meant I
had to worry about two battered and almost completely useless planets
with tiny mining colonies and the usual one light-year territorial
boundary as well as the station itself.

It took nearly three years of hard work to achieve a precarious
stability both in the running of the station and between the species
who visited and lived here. The Danadan threatened to upset it all
when they declared this had always been then' space and demanded
special trading privileges. At about the same time the Seouras
presence along the Confederacy border grew stronger and the two species