"Wen Spencer - Endless Blue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spencer Wen)

moved closer to scoop a handful of grit out of the air. He rubbed it between his fingers.

"This is sand. This rock is coral." Mikhail recognized the underlying smell nowтАФthe briny scent of
something long soaked in the salt water. The white powder could be salt crusting the steel.

"Three different species of coral, all trademarked." Which made them Earth species adapted for terra
forming purposes. "So far we've picked thirty-two life forms off the housing. Other than the coral, we
couldn't identify any of them."

Mikhail had seen what reentry of an Earth-like planet would do to most spaceships. Gravity and
wind-shear tattered the ship into pieces which tumbled down into the blue, at first like pebbles dropped
into water, and then the pieces would start to smoke. Finally they flashed to fireballs of molten steel,
becoming a firestorm . . .

Mikhail shook off the memory, focusing on the mystery at hand.

There were no scorch marks on the drive housingтАФwhich begged the question of how it got into an
ocean without undergoing reentry? And where was the rest of the ship?

"What ship is it from?" Mikhail asked.

Heward took out a VIDscan, aimed it at the drive, and activated it. After punching in his security code,
he held it out wordlessly to Mikhail to read its screen.

Wormhole drive, serial number WDU-290843, installed in Jupiter-class carrier UCS. Fenrir.

A Jupiter-class was the largest spaceship that the United Colonies made. Years went into its
construction, and it had a crew numbering in the thousands. That explained Heward's involvement. Why
had Mikhail been called in? He was Novaya Rus militia, technically not part of the United Colonies force.
It was only a matter of goodwill that he responded. The nameFenrir rang no bells, so it had been
destroyed prior to him entering the military. Considering the coral growth, it might have been lost even
before Mikhail was born, as the United Colonies had been fighting the nefrim years before the Novaya
Rus Empire joined the effort.

"What happened to theFenrir ?" Mikhail asked.

"It vanished ten years ago." Heward scrolled down. "We assumed it misjumped and the evidence partly
supports that. The second to last entry shows that a mis-calibration took them to zero."

Mikhail frowned at the entry. A wormhole drive created a tunnel from one point in space to another.
Any positive number would put them in normal space. Zero was the theorized null that the tunnel passed
throughтАФthe nowhere between two points of some where. While the drive might think that theFenrir
went nowhere, it obviously went someplace. IfFenrir didn't simply cease to exist, standard protocol for a
ship of its size was to radio High Command its new location. Even if it somehow warped into a planet's
gravity well there should have been still time to launch its lifepods; there would have been a chorus of
distress signals. And what of theFenrir's shuttles, which were capable of lifting off a planet and warping
home? Why hadn't at least one survived to contact High Command?
 A ship of the Fenrir's size couldn't vanish without misjumping. Since the wormhole drive generated the
warp field, it was the only piece of the spaceship that couldn't be left behind when the rest ceased to
exist. The two facts directly conflicted.