"Bud Sparhawk - Primrose and Thorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sparhawk Bud)

He just wished that she wasn't such a pain in the ass.



Louella came awake in an instant and checked her watch. She had managed to sleep for nearly five hours
without being jarred awake. "Damn Pascal's eyes," she complained to herself as she fastened her truss.
"He must be running safe again." That meant that she would have to make up for lost time during her
watch, as usual.

She rolled out of the bunk, stepped cautiously to the deck and used the toilet, splashing a little water from
the sink up her nose to counteract the dryness from the ammonia fumes.

"Tea's hot," Pascal called down to her in a voice heavy with fatigue.

"Thanks," she replied, looking for the thermos. "How did you find time to make it?"

"You mean how much progress did that cost us, don't you," he replied sharply. "Not a bit, I'm sure."

"Do you think that the competition's doing better? Damn, but I wish we had some way of telling where
the other boats are!"



A week before everyone had set off from Charlie Sierra Six on the first leg of the Great Jupiter Race, as
the press had been calling it. The first leg would take them around CS-15 and then back to CS-27,
where they would come to windward and race downwind to CS-6, where they had begun.

Louella had watched the heat signature of their prime competitor fall to Thorn's lee when they came out
of the shelter of the starting station, indicating that they had caught the vortex off Thorn and were
spinning away to get good air. It was a trick most sailors learned before they left their cribs.

They had watched the diminishing white dot that represented the station fade into the background noise
as Thorn pulled steadily westward, their speed climbing the whole time under Jupiter's fierce winds. It
was therefore a little disturbing to discover a heat signature steadily increasing in definition on their aft
screen. Somehow one of the other boats had managed to catch a better wind cell than theirs.

Louella jibed to port, hoping to create a pocket of dirty air behind Thorn that would interfere with the
other's progress. The white dot responded by immediately moving to starboard, long before they could
have felt the effects of Louella's maneuver.

"Obviously they can see us better than we can see them," Pascal cursed as he tried to crank up the gain.
"It's probably the wind blowing our signature backwards. Should we jibe again?"

Louella dismissed the idea; Thorn lost some momentum each time they jibed. "Let's concentrate on
building up our speed," she replied, making some tiny adjustments to the set of the sails.

The image of the other boat faded to port and finally disappeared. They were six hours out from the start.

"What are they doing now?" Louella wondered aloud. "Could they have caught another favorable wind