"David Weber & Steve White - Starfire 3 - In Death Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

money.
But that was only a passing thought, for his attention was on his display. For all his deliberate
disinterest, this was the real reason he'd fought for Survey duty straight out of the Academy. Survey
attracted those with incurable wanderlust, the sort who simply had to know what lay beyond the next hill,
and the first look at a new star systemтАФthe knowledge that his were among the very first human eyes ever
to see itтАФstill filled the commodore with a childlike wonder and delight.
 "Primary's an M9," Channing reported, yet not even that announcement could quench Braun's
sense of accomplishment. A red dwarf meant the possibility of finding a "useful" habitable planet was
virtually nonexistent, but that didn't make the system useless. Many an unpopulated star system had
proved an immensely valuable warp junction, andтАФ
"Sir, our emergence point's a Type Fourteen!" Channing said suddenly, and Braun twitched
upright in his command chair.
"Confirm!" he said sharply, but it was only a reflex. Officers like Channing didn't make that sort
of mistake, and his mind kicked into high gear as Plotting double-checked the data.
"Confirmed, Commodore. Definitely a Type Fourteen."
"Prep and launch the drone, Captain Elswick. Then go to Condition Baker, standard spiral." Braun
made himself sit back once more, laying his forearms on the arms of his chair, and pushed the sharpness
out of his voice. No need to get excited just because it was a closed warp point, he told himself firmly.
They weren't all that uncommon.
"Aye, aye, Sir. Communications, launch the drone. Tactical, take us into cloak at Condition Baker
and confirm!"
Braun frowned at his plot as Argive expelled a warp-capable courier drone to alert Cheltwyn and
the rest of the flotilla then began to move once more, sweeping outward in a standard survey spiral, hidden
by her ECM while passive sensors peered into the endless dark. A subtly different tension gripped her
bridge crew, and Braun's frown deepened as he ran through his mission brief once more.
There'd been little pressure to survey the Indra System's unexplored warp point for forty years for
two reasons. First, there'd been no human population within five transits of it until the first outposts went
in in Merriweather and Erebor, so Survey had seen no pressing need to explore further. That, as Braun
well knew, reflected budgetary constraints as much as anything else. The Corporate World-dominated
Federal government was much more inclined to fund Survey's operations to maintain nav beacons and
update charts for heavily traveled areas than to "waste" money on "speculative missions" in
underpopulated regions of the Fringe.
But the second reason no one had attached any urgency to exploring Indra's single unsurveyed
warp point was that nothing had ever come out of it. The nonappearance of anyone else's surveying
starships had seemed to indicate there was no star-traveling speciesтАФand so no external threat to the
Federation's securityтАФon its other side.
But that comfortable assumption had just become inoperable. "Closed" warp points were far less
common than "open" onesтАФor, at least, astrographers had traditionally assumed they were. It was hard to
be positive, since the only way to locate a closed point was to come through it from an open one at the far
end of the link, and the latest models suggested closed points might in fact occur much more frequently
than previously assumed. Indeed, the more recent math predicted that the conditions which created such
warp points in the first place would tend to put closed points at both ends of a link.
If true, there could be hundreds of undetectable warp lines threaded all through explored space,
but what mattered just now was that the discovery that Indra's open warp point connected to a closed one
here automatically upgraded SF 27's mission status. If no one could even find the thing, the fact that no
one had come through it meant nothing, so the possibility of meeting another advanced species increased
exponentially. Star-traveling races were rare. So far humanity had encountered barely half a dozen of
them, but some of those encounters had been traumatic, and Survey Command's operational doctrine had
been established as far back as the First Interstellar War. The first responsibility of any Survey ship was to
report the existence of such a race before attempting to make contact, and the second was to see to it that