"Smith, E E Doc - d'Alembert 8 - Eclipsing Binaries" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

ahead was not so densely packed that it was an impassable hazard, but it did serve as a
natural obstacle course to be successfully astrogated. A wrong move could be fatal. It
would take fast reflexes and steady nerves to make it through without mishap.

In the co-pilot's seat, Jules d'Alembert asked, "Are you sure you're ready for this?"

The pilot, his brother-in-law, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "If I don't do it now,
I never will," Pias Bavol said. "I've gone through here at cruising speed, but I'll have to do
better than that. Lady A won't let me cruise along casually if she gets me in her sights."

"Eh, bien," Jules said. "The show's all yours."

Pias stretched his fingers and swivelled his shoulders a few times to limber them up, then
leaned forward to concentrate on the control screen. The panel extended before him, a
broad expanse covered with buttons, knobs, switches, screens, dials, gauges, and
glowing lights. Pias extended the protective screens to their limits to shield the ship from
a stream of particles too small to be detected on the sensors. He cut off the rear
scanners and focused all the vessel's detection capacity to a rapid forward scan. He
wasn't worried about asteroids overtaking him from the rear-but the defensive shields
would be useless against a flying piece of rock more than a couple of meters in
diameter.

After one last millisecond of hesitation, he turned off the automatic pilot and took
complete manual control of the spacecraft. The autopilot would have been useful for
dodging one rock at a time, at slow speeds, but it tended to overcompensate; in
swerving to avoid one oncoming asteroid it could very well steer them directly into
another and not be able to correct in time. Fine tuning like that was still the province of
human reflexes.

Reflexes were one of Pias's greatest assets. Both he and Jules were natives of planets
whose gravity was three times stronger than that of Earth. Over the generations, nature
had bred their ancestors for lightning reactions. Pias, Jules, and all their kin could move
at speeds that dazzled people from normal gravity worlds.

The first obstacles were starting to appear on the scanners now, along with
computer-generated arcs showing their orbits relative to the ship. No danger so far; the
closest would miss by more than a kilometer. Pias had arbitrarily set himself a safety
range of two hundred meters. Anything closer than that would be avoided; beyond that
limit, he refused to worry about it.

In the seat beside him, he knew Jules was watching the screen as intently as he was. At
the slightest hint that Pias might not be able to handle the situation, Jules was prepared
to switch control over to his co-pilot's board and get them out of trouble. It was
comforting, in a way, to have such a backup, because Pias knew Jules was an expert
pilot. All the same, he was hoping it wouldn't be necessary. More obstacles were
appearing on the scanner now, ranging in size from small boulders to large mountains.
Pias ignored the size and mass data also displayed on the screen; all he cared about
was how close the object's path would come to his ship's.

The first indication of something that would come within the safety limits appeared. Even