"Michael McCollum - Maker 2 - Procyion Promise" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

rings was a large transparent bubble. Each of these discontinuities had been smoothed over and faired
into the sleek roundness of the sphere.

Suddenly, her introspective mood gave way to a surge of adrenaline. Obviously, if this were a starship,
then Earth had to learn of it, and quickly.

тАЬComputer on!тАЭ

Her urgent words were answered by continuing silence from the daycruiserтАЩs central brain. She crouched
down, preparing to jump for her ship, when she was brushed by a strong wind from out of the depths of
space.

Her reaction was more instinctive than intellectual. She chinned her maneuvering unit controls, reached
out to grasp the twin joysticks, and jumped for the daycruiser, all in one smooth motion. Once
spaceborne, she savagely twisted her power control full against the stops while fighting to keep from
going into a spin.

After ten seconds, she shut down her thrusters and twisted the sticks to turn head over heels. She felt her
mouth go dry as she realized that she had picked up too much speed. She was already too close to the
daycruiser and would hit with enough force to give her flat feet for life.

Knowing that she had no hope of stopping in time, she applied full power anyway. As she did so, there
was the crackling of a static discharge inside her suit as every hair on her body stood on end. She
watched in disbelief as the daycruiser suddenly slid off to one side and she began to float toward the
starship. She could feel her heart pounding in her temples while her mind struggled with the impossible.
She had executed what must have been a fifty gee turn, yet had not felt the slightest sensation of
acceleration.

Whoever they were, they had her.

She was fast approaching the starship now, passing into shadow as its bulk eclipsed the sun. Chryse felt
a chill that had nothing to do with the sudden drop in temperature on the outside of her suit. She noticed a
wisp of vapor in front of her faceplate and realized that she still had her thrusters firing at full power.
Whatever the nature of the beam, it seemed to trap her exhaust gasses close to her suit. She switched off
her maneuvering unit.

She slowed to a stop in the same visually violent fashion as she had started the journey. Once again, there
was no sensation of acceleration. One second, she was zipping along on a course she didnтАЩt wish to take,
the next found her hanging motionless in front of a closed airlock. As she watched, the airlock opened,
and perfectly ordinary light flooded out. Two figures stood silhouetted in the light. She gazed at them and
felt hot tears suddenly well up in the corners of her eyes.

There was no mistaking the characteristic form of the vacsuits that the two creatures wore. They were
biaxially symmetric, possessing of a single cluster of sense organs mounted on a short, movable stalk,
with two each grasping and locomotive appendages emanating from a thick torso. In other words -

They were as human as Chryse herself.
 CHAPTER 3