Dusk (Dusk 1) Read Online Free
birthday.”
“Happy birthday to you,” Pete joshed.
Neville smiled around a derisive snort and took a good-sized slug of his drink. He closed his eyes appreciatively, apparently enjoying the whiskey as much as Pete did.
For a few minutes the men sat in silence, studying the ever-dwindling contents of their tumblers. Finally, Neville spoke.
“As much as I wish I could say this is a social call, Pete, we do have business to discuss.”
Something in his voice set the hair on Pete’s neck on end. Neville’s tone was reluctant, and Pete knew from long experience when a senior officer started a conversation that way, said officer had something to convey that the junior officer was going to actively hate. Usually it served as a prelude to a world-class ass-reaming the general didn’t want to give, but had been compelled to by Above. That didn’t seem to fit here. If the general had wanted to rack his ass, he would hardly have given Pete a drink of whiskey worth forty credits if it was worth an ancient American penny.
“What’s on your mind?”
Neville depressed a control stud on his desk. Three things happened simultaneously. The heavy blinds on the airy windows locked down, the lights dimmed, and a holovid cutaway view of the Milky Way flickered into view above the desk’s faux slate surface. He took another sip, the lines of his face suddenly haggard and sinister-looking in the blue nimbus from the holo field, and grimaced as if the whiskey had soured in the glass.
Although , Pete thought, if anything soured the whiskey, it’s probably planning how to deliver whatever shit sandwich he’s about to hand me and not the sauce itself .
Neville touched another control stud and the holo seemed to swoop in on itself, zeroing in on one of the galactic arms. Pete knew astrogators who could name the different galactic arms by a dozen celestial landmarks, but he’d never much cared to learn. Since astrogation wasn’t his headache, it was all the same to him. He just needed to know where to go and what to shoot at when he arrived.
A blue-green point of light flared to life, pulsing gently about halfway down the arm.
“You are here,” Neville remarked with a chuckle. Pete laughed along with him at the old astrogation joke. A tri-dee representation of the galaxy was fine as it went, but “here” today could mean “a hundred thousand fucking klicks elsewhere” next week. To compound the problem, to get anywhere, one also had to account for not simply one’s current position in three-dimensional space, but also the projected location of the destination, which had a nasty habit of changing. Then factor in several hundred or thousand meteors, asteroids, dust clouds, moons, planets, and other navigational hazards lying in wait between “here” and “there,” and the ballistic irregularities of any number of gravitational phenomena, and one began to see the magnitude and shape of the problem. The earliest forms of astrogation had often been described by frustrated or pissed-off explorers as trying to shoot a moving target the size of the head of a pin with a BB gun in a shooting gallery with all the lights off on a dark night while some ass-clown randomly flung variously sized rocks at the shooter.
As the art and science of navigating among the stars improved, such dangers and difficulties were greatly reduced, but even the best and most accurate models could not fully account for every possible navigational hazard. Mastering the theoretical underpinnings of superluminal travel had also reduced the dangers in one direction, allowing ships to “sidestep” most ordinary physical threats, but increased them in another. Many ships had been lost, costing trillions of Terran credits and tens of thousands of human lives, as inexperienced or unwary navigational staff or faulty astrogation programs sent experimental ship designs into newly formed wormholes, black holes, or gravitational anomalies.
There were a million
“Happy birthday to you,” Pete joshed.
Neville smiled around a derisive snort and took a good-sized slug of his drink. He closed his eyes appreciatively, apparently enjoying the whiskey as much as Pete did.
For a few minutes the men sat in silence, studying the ever-dwindling contents of their tumblers. Finally, Neville spoke.
“As much as I wish I could say this is a social call, Pete, we do have business to discuss.”
Something in his voice set the hair on Pete’s neck on end. Neville’s tone was reluctant, and Pete knew from long experience when a senior officer started a conversation that way, said officer had something to convey that the junior officer was going to actively hate. Usually it served as a prelude to a world-class ass-reaming the general didn’t want to give, but had been compelled to by Above. That didn’t seem to fit here. If the general had wanted to rack his ass, he would hardly have given Pete a drink of whiskey worth forty credits if it was worth an ancient American penny.
“What’s on your mind?”
Neville depressed a control stud on his desk. Three things happened simultaneously. The heavy blinds on the airy windows locked down, the lights dimmed, and a holovid cutaway view of the Milky Way flickered into view above the desk’s faux slate surface. He took another sip, the lines of his face suddenly haggard and sinister-looking in the blue nimbus from the holo field, and grimaced as if the whiskey had soured in the glass.
Although , Pete thought, if anything soured the whiskey, it’s probably planning how to deliver whatever shit sandwich he’s about to hand me and not the sauce itself .
Neville touched another control stud and the holo seemed to swoop in on itself, zeroing in on one of the galactic arms. Pete knew astrogators who could name the different galactic arms by a dozen celestial landmarks, but he’d never much cared to learn. Since astrogation wasn’t his headache, it was all the same to him. He just needed to know where to go and what to shoot at when he arrived.
A blue-green point of light flared to life, pulsing gently about halfway down the arm.
“You are here,” Neville remarked with a chuckle. Pete laughed along with him at the old astrogation joke. A tri-dee representation of the galaxy was fine as it went, but “here” today could mean “a hundred thousand fucking klicks elsewhere” next week. To compound the problem, to get anywhere, one also had to account for not simply one’s current position in three-dimensional space, but also the projected location of the destination, which had a nasty habit of changing. Then factor in several hundred or thousand meteors, asteroids, dust clouds, moons, planets, and other navigational hazards lying in wait between “here” and “there,” and the ballistic irregularities of any number of gravitational phenomena, and one began to see the magnitude and shape of the problem. The earliest forms of astrogation had often been described by frustrated or pissed-off explorers as trying to shoot a moving target the size of the head of a pin with a BB gun in a shooting gallery with all the lights off on a dark night while some ass-clown randomly flung variously sized rocks at the shooter.
As the art and science of navigating among the stars improved, such dangers and difficulties were greatly reduced, but even the best and most accurate models could not fully account for every possible navigational hazard. Mastering the theoretical underpinnings of superluminal travel had also reduced the dangers in one direction, allowing ships to “sidestep” most ordinary physical threats, but increased them in another. Many ships had been lost, costing trillions of Terran credits and tens of thousands of human lives, as inexperienced or unwary navigational staff or faulty astrogation programs sent experimental ship designs into newly formed wormholes, black holes, or gravitational anomalies.
There were a million
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