Escape to Fear

Начало книги

At T.O.T. plus eight thousand three hours, the light experimental cruiser Oberlin dropped through a fold of superspace to take objective timespace fixes on the 23rd Island Universe as ail astrogation check — only to find, instead of the extra-galactic emptiness that never ceased to be horrifying to the most seasoned crew members, a Gaice battle wagon within a scant thirty thousand miles.

Fane, the watch officer, was at the controls, and in that moment of shock seven years of training paid off. As though slapping at an insect, his hard palm whacked back the switch he had just opened, reducing the mass of the Oberlin to that fractional part of an Earth-weight ounce expressed by one over three times ten to the ninth power.

The following fifteen minutes of violent nausea experienced by crew and the solitary passenger indicated that had Fane’s reflexes been slower by a hundredth of a second, the Oberlin would have sped on through superspace carrying its load of corpses until at last the weakest link in the drive devices failed.

Читать дальше →