The universe is monstrously empty. Galaxies, stars and planets are lost in this manifest infinity and making a path from star to star is far from easy.

But the smart ones managed to do it. Moreover, they learned to move from one luminary to another faster than light. It’s funny - at the finish line, looking at the star from which they started (if it was possible to see it from the finishing sphere), they could admire the light emitted hundreds and thousands of cycles ago. And they could return back after spending only a few days, or at most weeks. True, so far intelligent people have traveled only within one galaxy - a loose spiral cloud hanging in the middle of observable infinity.

The final sphere crumpled and tore up space in the immediate vicinity of a nameless star, devoid of planets, but over millions of cycles of patient waiting, it had captured several stray asteroids, fragments of past cosmic catastrophes. From behind the barrier, immediately breaking through the fabric of the universe, an interstellar ship fell out: an not quite regular volumetric ellipsoid, flat and streamlined, like a sea mollusk with tightly closed valves. For some time, the disturbed space continued to bend and rage, but the ship did not care about this riot. Both to the ship itself and to those who controlled the ship.

The side effects of the jump did not affect the nearby star either - what does it, a hot thermonuclear furnace, care about some pathetic disturbances of space at a distance of several thousand chromosphere diameters? Even to asteroids, debris from past disasters, this did not look like a disaster at all. An instantaneous and vanishingly weak change in the gravitational field, unable to move even a speck of dust (how much does a speck of dust weigh on the surface of an asteroid?) - what kind of catastrophe is that... Radiation? Also not serious.

If the surroundings of this star system were as empty as thousands of other systems in the galaxy, nothing would have happened.

However, for quite a long time around this star, even by cosmic standards, a very tiny thing was circling next to the same asteroids - a rod-cylinder made of dark material, comparable in size only to the creatures that controlled the ship that emerged from behind the barrier. Here the spatial disturbances found a response - under their influence, the microstructure of the rod began to change. Areas of molecular compression and rarefaction arose, the crystal lattice flowed and changed. Subnuclear connections were changing. Energy was absorbed and released. The disturbances in space caused by the ship's jump through hundreds of light cycles awakened the rod, and it in turn influenced space. More precisely, on the properties of space, properties that are extremely deep. True, this was an impact of a completely different kind than the side effects of an interstellar jump. Now the rod was very reminiscent of a hand-held flashlight, lost by someone in zero gravity: a conical beam erupted from one of its ends, only this beam was invisible and imperceptible to the ship’s instruments. At some distance from the rod, the beam broke off, forming a circle with a diameter... well, let's put it this way: quite sufficient for the above-mentioned ship to slip into it, like a trained animal into a trainer's hoop, without touching the boundaries of this hoop anywhere.

The space in the finishing sphere calmed down, returning to its long-established form. The space inside the ray and circle did not even think of worrying: it simply changed its properties and froze in this form.

Meanwhile, the ship began to maneuver on planetary thrust. I got my bearings, adjusted the speed and looked for the desired drift vector to prepare a new jump.

For a long, long time, while the rod calmly waited at the nameless star, ships appeared near it three times. The first time was in time immemorial, and it was exactly the same ship that delivered and suspended the rod itself in the present orbit. This ship maneuvered competently, waited until the rod created a beam and a circle, passed the very center of the circle and disappeared from the galaxy forever.

The second and third ships appeared immeasurably later, when everyone who installed rods on some stars had already died out as a race and had completely lost interest in interstellar travel. Both ships did not stay in the vicinity of the still nameless star for long, did not approach the core and left this part of space in their own way, without the help of the transporter of the forgotten race.

Today the stars have forgotten the race of pilots who piloted the second and third ships. Just like the ancient giants of knowledge who installed the conveyor rod. Time is inexorable. It spares neither those who invent methods of interstellar travel, nor the devices with the help of which these travels are carried out. But the oblong dark cylinder with a diameter/length ratio of one to four seemed to have not known the touch of time.

In a certain sense it was so. The long-forgotten race of giants did not leave behind any other devices with similar properties, so the cylinder could be considered one of the oldest objects in the galaxy. And there simply wasn’t another like it in this galaxy.

The fourth ship, after the next maneuver, by the will of fate, lay down on a quickly calculated trajectory, and this trajectory passed precisely through a conventional circle that truncated the conical beam of the ancient “flashlight”, the conveyor rod. But the trajectory pierced the circle not near the center, but at the very edge, at the border, so much so that the ship mostly fell into a spot of altered physical properties, and to a lesser extent it passed by the spot, where space had the most ordinary properties.

The part that fell within the range of the conveyor disappeared. The remainder, like an opened tin can, ejected the air contained inside, a thin and quickly thinning swarm of objects of the most varied shapes and sizes, and a dozen or so corpses instantly frozen to glassy hardness. One of the cosmonaut travelers, unfortunately, was wearing a special protective suit at the time of the disaster - a slow and much more painful death awaited him. But just as, alas, inevitable. Four more poor fellows were in a hermetically sealed compartment. Their agony lasted longer, since the compartment had a certain reserve of autonomy, but had absolutely no means of communication capable of notifying its relatives at such a monstrous distance from the inhabited worlds.

When the rod extinguished the transport “beam”, the cosmonaut in a special suit and his four colleagues in the compartment did not even have time to figure out what had happened.

Waiting is the natural state of the ancient transporter. He sank back into anticipation.

True, the transporter did not know what was waiting. It simply responded to every disturbance of space near itself - only its “close” meant a sphere into which the nameless star and its entire dwarf planetary system in addition freely fit.

Automata can wait.

VERY LONG PROLOGUE

“We’ve arrived,” Veselov said neutrally.

He always spoke as if he was doing the other person a favor. Or he was terribly dissatisfied with something.

“Thank you,” Pluzhnik responded with some malice.

Pluzhnik Veselov often irritated him - probably precisely because of this emphasized seriousness.

But you can't really yell at the foreman. And you won’t be very offended. More precisely, you can be offended as much as you like, but it will lead to absolutely nothing. If you are openly offended, you can also get ragged along the official line.

In general, Sanya Veselov suffered in silence.

Pluzhnik, more often referred to as “Timurych” in the team, nodded majestically and disappeared from the ghostly communication column above the console.

Veselov wrinkled his nose and stuck out his tongue into space.

The raider actually arrived at its destination - a standard small search engine of the Shuster Epsilon class. The crew is seven people, the pulsation range is up to eight hundred light years. In exceptional cases - up to one thousand two hundred. It was not recommended to move further; the X-drive began to go astray when pointing at the finishing sphere. The team of searchers on the raider was only partially staffed - instead of seven, there were only five. There weren't enough people, as usual. Therefore, the functions of the foreman and captain of the raider (and part-time doctor) were performed by the same person - Tahir Timurovich Pluzhnik, aka Te-Te-Pe, which most women on the earthly Base deciphered with resentment in their voices as “pulled-fucked-sent” " Because when he was drunk, Timurych really was greedy for the female sex and for some reason mystically irresistible, and the next morning, having sobered up, he always fell into melancholy and became terribly cynical, unkind and unbearable.

Vladimir Vasiliev Legacy of giants

Attention! No Yuri Semetsky was harmed in the process of writing this book!

Long before the prologue

The universe is monstrously empty. Galaxies, stars and planets are lost in this manifest infinity, and making a path from star to star is far from easy.

But the smart ones managed to do it. Moreover, they learned to move from one luminary to another faster than light. It’s funny - at the finish line, looking at the star from which they started (if it was possible to see it from the finishing sphere), they could admire the light emitted hundreds and thousands of cycles ago. And they could return back after spending only a few days, or at most weeks. True, so far intelligent people have traveled only within one galaxy - a loose spiral cloud hanging in the middle of observable infinity.

The final sphere crumpled and tore up space in the immediate vicinity of a nameless star, devoid of planets, but over millions of cycles of patient waiting, it had captured several stray asteroids, fragments of past cosmic catastrophes. From behind the barrier, immediately breaking through the fabric of the universe, an interstellar ship fell out: an not quite regular volumetric ellipsoid, flat and streamlined, like a sea mollusk with tightly closed valves. For some time, the disturbed space continued to bend and rage, but the ship did not care about this riot. Both to the ship itself and to those who controlled the ship.

The side effects of the jump did not affect the nearby star either - what does it, a hot thermonuclear furnace, care about some pathetic disturbances of space at a distance of several thousand chromosphere diameters? Even to asteroids, debris from past disasters, this did not look like a disaster at all. An instantaneous and vanishingly weak change in the gravitational field, unable to move even a speck of dust (how much does a speck of dust weigh on the surface of an asteroid?) - what kind of catastrophe is that... Radiation? Also not serious.

If the surroundings of this star system were as empty as thousands of other systems in the galaxy, nothing would have happened.

However, for quite a long time around this star, even by cosmic standards, a very tiny thing was circling next to the same asteroids - a rod-cylinder made of dark material, comparable in size only to the creatures that controlled the ship that emerged from behind the barrier. Here the spatial disturbances found a response - under their influence, the microstructure of the rod began to change. Areas of molecular compression and rarefaction arose, the crystal lattice flowed and changed. Subnuclear connections were changing. Energy was absorbed and released. The disturbances in space caused by the ship's jump through hundreds of light cycles awakened the rod, and it, in turn, influenced space. More precisely, on the properties of space, properties that are extremely deep. True, this was an impact of a completely different kind than the side effects of an interstellar jump. Now the rod was very reminiscent of a hand-held flashlight, lost by someone in zero gravity: a conical beam erupted from one of its ends, only this beam was invisible and imperceptible to the ship’s instruments. At some distance from the rod, the beam broke off, forming a circle with a diameter... well, let’s say, quite sufficient for the above-mentioned ship to slip into it, like a trained animal into a trainer’s hoop, without touching the boundaries of this hoop anywhere.

The space in the finishing sphere calmed down, returning to its long-established form. The space inside the ray and circle did not even think of worrying, it simply changed its properties and froze in this form.

Meanwhile, the ship began to maneuver on planetary thrust. I got my bearings, adjusted the speed and looked for the desired drift vector to prepare a new jump.

For a long, long time, while the rod calmly waited at the nameless star, ships appeared near it three times. The first time was in time immemorial, and it was exactly the same ship that delivered and suspended the rod itself in the present orbit. This ship maneuvered competently, waited until the rod created a beam and a circle, passed the very center of the circle and disappeared from the galaxy forever.

The second and third ships appeared immeasurably later, when everyone who installed rods on some stars had already died out as a race and had completely lost interest in interstellar travel. Both ships did not stay in the vicinity of the still nameless star for long, did not approach the core and left this part of space in their own way, without the help of the transporter of the forgotten race.

Today the stars have forgotten the race of pilots who piloted the second and third ships. Just like the ancient giants of knowledge who installed the conveyor rod. Time is inexorable. It spares neither those who invent methods of interstellar travel, nor the devices with the help of which these travels are carried out. But the oblong dark cylinder with a diameter/length ratio of one to seven seemed to have not known the touch of time.

In a certain sense it was so. The long-forgotten race of giants did not leave behind any other devices with similar properties, so the cylinder could be considered one of the oldest objects in the galaxy. And there simply wasn’t another like it in this galaxy.

The fourth ship, after the next maneuver, by the will of fate, lay down on a quickly calculated trajectory, and this trajectory passed precisely through a conventional circle that truncated the conical beam of the ancient “flashlight”, the conveyor rod. But the trajectory pierced the circle not near the center, but at the very edge, at the border, so much so that the ship mostly fell into a spot of altered physical properties, and to a lesser extent it passed by the spot, where space had the most ordinary properties.

The part that fell within the range of the conveyor disappeared. The remainder, like an opened tin can, ejected the air contained inside, a thin and quickly thinning swarm of objects of the most varied shapes and sizes, and a dozen or so corpses instantly frozen to glassy hardness. One of the cosmonaut travelers, unfortunately, was wearing a special protective suit at the time of the disaster - a slow and much more painful death awaited him. But just as, alas, inevitable. Four more poor fellows were in a hermetically sealed compartment. Their agony lasted longer, since the compartment had a certain reserve of autonomy, but had absolutely no means of communication capable of notifying their relatives at such a monstrous distance from the inhabited worlds.

When the rod extinguished the transport “beam”, the cosmonaut in a special suit and his four colleagues in the compartment did not even have time to figure out what had happened?

This book has everything that, if executed well, could make it an excellent space opera:

1) A world inhabited by many intelligent races. If we came up with a story for each race, thought through the influence of biological features on the character of the representatives of the race, and prescribed the interaction of different races with each other, we could create a very tasty Universe. But the author didn’t bother too much, and in the end the aliens turned out to be extremely boring, looking like people dressed in alien costumes. For example, the only difference between people and shat-surs that the author could come up with is (apart from appearance) that when the former grunt with pleasure, the latter purr, and when the former soap their necks, the latter rub the forearm. Otherwise, these two races are complete copies of each other.

2) The rich history of the world with disappeared forerunners who left behind mysterious artifacts that must be painstakingly searched and explored. A technique that has already become banal, which, in my opinion, can still play in a space opera. In this case, a relatively small part of the book devoted to the search for an artifact turned out to be quite successful.

3) Space Robinsonade. The main characters spend a significant part of the time making their way through the alien jungle. This storyline was somewhat reminiscent of “The Dawns Here Are Quiet.” A group of people - non-professional military men, including only one professional, is faced with superior enemy forces. The action takes place in the forests. Some hunt others. If it had been written in the same way as that of another Vasiliev - Boris, the book would have been a masterpiece. And so... At the beginning it seemed that it would be good - probably the author has experience of hiking (kayaks, Karelian forests...), this gave reason to hope. But it seems that the author’s laziness was overcome. A closed group of people in extreme conditions is generally a very fruitful basis for a plot. If you work on the characters' characters, on... in a word, if you work. The author didn't do any work. After reading the book, none of its characters remain in my memory; I don’t want to sympathize with any of them, because they all look like cardboard. Almost anyone can be thrown out of the story without harming the plot.

4) Fight scenes. One of the weakest points in the book. While the author most likely has experience in forest treks, he most likely does not have experience in military operations or planning military operations. At least, it (this experience) does not manifest itself in any way.

As a summary: the book is very uneven. There are parts that are read with interest. There are (and there are more of them) that are read with a grimace on the face. Overall, the book leaves a feeling of disappointment that a potentially good idea was spoiled by poor execution.

Attention! No Yuri Semetsky was harmed in the process of writing this book!

Long before the prologue

The universe is monstrously empty. Galaxies, stars and planets are lost in this manifest infinity, and making a path from star to star is far from easy.

But the smart ones managed to do it. Moreover, they learned to move from one luminary to another faster than light. It's funny - at the finish line, looking at the star from which they started (if it was possible to see it from the finishing sphere), they could admire the light emitted hundreds and thousands of cycles ago. And they could return back after spending only a few days, or at most weeks. True, so far intelligent people have traveled only within one galaxy - a loose spiral cloud hanging in the middle of observable infinity.

The final sphere crumpled and tore up space in the immediate vicinity of a nameless star, devoid of planets, but over millions of cycles of patient waiting, it had captured several stray asteroids, fragments of past cosmic catastrophes. From behind the barrier, immediately breaking through the fabric of the universe, an interstellar ship fell out: an not quite regular volumetric ellipsoid, flat and streamlined, like a sea mollusk with tightly closed valves. For some time, the disturbed space continued to bend and rage, but the ship did not care about this riot. Both to the ship itself and to those who controlled the ship.

The side effects of the jump did not affect the nearby star either - what does it matter to a hot thermonuclear furnace, some pathetic disturbances of space at a distance of several thousand chromosphere diameters? Even to asteroids, debris from past disasters, this did not look like a disaster at all. An instantaneous and vanishingly weak change in the gravitational field, unable to move even a speck of dust (how much does a speck of dust weigh on the surface of an asteroid?) - what kind of catastrophe is that... Radiation? Also not serious.

If the surroundings of this star system were as empty as thousands of other systems in the galaxy, nothing would have happened.

However, for quite a long time around this star, even by cosmic standards, a very tiny thing was circling next to the same asteroids - a rod-cylinder made of dark material, comparable in size only to the creatures that controlled the ship that emerged from behind the barrier. Here, the spatial disturbances found a response - under their influence, the microstructure of the rod began to change. Areas of molecular compression and rarefaction arose, the crystal lattice flowed and changed. Subnuclear connections were changing. Energy was absorbed and released. The disturbances in space caused by the ship's jump through hundreds of light cycles awakened the rod, and it, in turn, influenced space. More precisely, on the properties of space, properties that are extremely deep. True, this was an impact of a completely different kind than the side effects of an interstellar jump. Now the rod was very reminiscent of a hand-held flashlight, lost by someone in zero gravity: a conical beam erupted from one of its ends, only this beam was invisible and imperceptible to the ship’s instruments. At some distance from the rod, the beam broke off, forming a circle with a diameter... well, let’s say, quite sufficient for the above-mentioned ship to slip into it, like a trained animal into a trainer’s hoop, without touching the boundaries of this hoop anywhere.

The space in the finishing sphere calmed down, returning to its long-established form. The space inside the ray and circle did not even think of worrying, it simply changed its properties and froze in this form.

Meanwhile, the ship began to maneuver on planetary thrust. I got my bearings, adjusted the speed and looked for the desired drift vector to prepare a new jump.

For a long, long time, while the rod calmly waited at the nameless star, ships appeared near it three times. The first time was in time immemorial, and it was exactly the same ship that delivered and suspended the rod itself in the present orbit. This ship maneuvered competently, waited until the rod created a beam and a circle, passed the very center of the circle and disappeared from the galaxy forever.

The second and third ships appeared immeasurably later, when everyone who installed rods on some stars had already died out as a race and had completely lost interest in interstellar travel. Both ships did not stay in the vicinity of the still nameless star for long, did not approach the core and left this part of space in their own way, without the help of the transporter of the forgotten race.

Today the stars have forgotten the race of pilots who piloted the second and third ships. Just like the ancient giants of knowledge who installed the conveyor rod. Time is inexorable. It spares neither those who invent methods of interstellar travel, nor the devices with the help of which these travels are carried out. But the oblong dark cylinder with a diameter/length ratio of one to seven seemed to have not known the touch of time.

In a certain sense it was so. The long-forgotten race of giants did not leave behind any other devices with similar properties, so the cylinder could be considered one of the oldest objects in the galaxy. And there simply wasn’t another like it in this galaxy.

The fourth ship, after the next maneuver, by the will of fate, lay down on a quickly calculated trajectory, and this trajectory passed precisely through a conventional circle that truncated the conical beam of the ancient “flashlight”, the conveyor rod. But the trajectory pierced the circle not near the center, but at the very edge, at the border, so much so that the ship mostly fell into a spot of altered physical properties, and to a lesser extent it passed by the spot, where space had the most ordinary properties.

The part that fell within the range of the conveyor disappeared. The remainder, like an opened tin can, ejected the air contained inside, a thin and quickly thinning swarm of objects of the most varied shapes and sizes, and a dozen or so corpses instantly frozen to glassy hardness. One of the cosmonaut travelers, to his misfortune, was wearing a special protective suit at the time of the disaster - a slow and much more painful death awaited him. But just as, alas, inevitable. Four more poor fellows were in a hermetically sealed compartment. Their agony lasted longer, since the compartment had a certain reserve of autonomy, but had absolutely no means of communication capable of notifying their relatives at such a monstrous distance from the inhabited worlds.

When the rod extinguished the transport “beam”, the cosmonaut in a special suit and his four colleagues in the compartment did not even have time to figure out what had happened?

Waiting is the natural state of the ancient transporter. He sank back into anticipation.

1

Vladimir Vasiliev

Legacy of the Giants

Attention! No Yuri Semetsky was harmed in the process of writing this book!

Long before the prologue

The universe is monstrously empty. Galaxies, stars and planets are lost in this manifest infinity, and making a path from star to star is far from easy.

But the smart ones managed to do it. Moreover, they learned to move from one luminary to another faster than light. It’s funny - at the finish line, looking at the star from which they started (if it was possible to see it from the finishing sphere), they could admire the light emitted hundreds and thousands of cycles ago. And they could return back after spending only a few days, or at most weeks. True, so far intelligent people have traveled only within one galaxy - a loose spiral cloud hanging in the middle of observable infinity.

The final sphere crumpled and tore up space in the immediate vicinity of a nameless star, devoid of planets, but over millions of cycles of patient waiting, it had captured several stray asteroids, fragments of past cosmic catastrophes. From behind the barrier, immediately breaking through the fabric of the universe, an interstellar ship fell out: an not quite regular volumetric ellipsoid, flat and streamlined, like a sea mollusk with tightly closed valves. For some time, the disturbed space continued to bend and rage, but the ship did not care about this riot. Both to the ship itself and to those who controlled the ship.

The side effects of the jump did not affect the nearby star either - what does it, a hot thermonuclear furnace, care about some pathetic disturbances of space at a distance of several thousand chromosphere diameters? Even to asteroids, debris from past disasters, this did not look like a disaster at all. An instantaneous and vanishingly weak change in the gravitational field, unable to move even a speck of dust (how much does a speck of dust weigh on the surface of an asteroid?) - what kind of catastrophe is that... Radiation? Also not serious.

If the surroundings of this star system were as empty as thousands of other systems in the galaxy, nothing would have happened.

However, for quite a long time around this star, even by cosmic standards, a very tiny thing was circling next to the same asteroids - a rod-cylinder made of dark material, comparable in size only to the creatures that controlled the ship that emerged from behind the barrier. Here the spatial disturbances found a response - under their influence, the microstructure of the rod began to change. Areas of molecular compression and rarefaction arose, the crystal lattice flowed and changed. Subnuclear connections were changing. Energy was absorbed and released. The disturbances in space caused by the ship's jump through hundreds of light cycles awakened the rod, and it, in turn, influenced space. More precisely, on the properties of space, properties that are extremely deep. True, this was an impact of a completely different kind than the side effects of an interstellar jump. Now the rod was very reminiscent of a hand-held flashlight, lost by someone in zero gravity: a conical beam erupted from one of its ends, only this beam was invisible and imperceptible to the ship’s instruments. At some distance from the rod, the beam broke off, forming a circle with a diameter... well, let’s say, quite sufficient for the above-mentioned ship to slip into it, like a trained animal into a trainer’s hoop, without touching the boundaries of this hoop anywhere.

The space in the finishing sphere calmed down, returning to its long-established form. The space inside the ray and circle did not even think of worrying, it simply changed its properties and froze in this form.

Meanwhile, the ship began to maneuver on planetary thrust. I got my bearings, adjusted the speed and looked for the desired drift vector to prepare a new jump.

For a long, long time, while the rod calmly waited at the nameless star, ships appeared near it three times. The first time was in time immemorial, and it was exactly the same ship that delivered and suspended the rod itself in the present orbit. This ship maneuvered competently, waited until the rod created a beam and a circle, passed the very center of the circle and disappeared from the galaxy forever.

The second and third ships appeared immeasurably later, when everyone who installed rods on some stars had already died out as a race and had completely lost interest in interstellar travel. Both ships did not stay in the vicinity of the still nameless star for long, did not approach the core and left this part of space in their own way, without the help of the transporter of the forgotten race.

Today the stars have forgotten the race of pilots who piloted the second and third ships. Just like the ancient giants of knowledge who installed the conveyor rod. Time is inexorable. It spares neither those who invent methods of interstellar travel, nor the devices with the help of which these travels are carried out. But the oblong dark cylinder with a diameter/length ratio of one to seven seemed to have not known the touch of time.

In a certain sense it was so. The long-forgotten race of giants did not leave behind any other devices with similar properties, so the cylinder could be considered one of the oldest objects in the galaxy. And there simply wasn’t another like it in this galaxy.

The fourth ship, after the next maneuver, by the will of fate, lay down on a quickly calculated trajectory, and this trajectory passed precisely through a conventional circle that truncated the conical beam of the ancient “flashlight”, the conveyor rod. But the trajectory pierced the circle not near the center, but at the very edge, at the border, so much so that the ship mostly fell into a spot of altered physical properties, and to a lesser extent it passed by the spot, where space had the most ordinary properties.

The part that fell within the range of the conveyor disappeared. The remainder, like an opened tin can, ejected the air contained inside, a thin and quickly thinning swarm of objects of the most varied shapes and sizes, and a dozen or so corpses instantly frozen to glassy hardness. One of the cosmonaut travelers, unfortunately, was wearing a special protective suit at the time of the disaster - a slow and much more painful death awaited him. But just as, alas, inevitable. Four more poor fellows were in a hermetically sealed compartment. Their agony lasted longer, since the compartment had a certain reserve of autonomy, but had absolutely no means of communication capable of notifying their relatives at such a monstrous distance from the inhabited worlds.

When the rod extinguished the transport “beam”, the cosmonaut in a special suit and his four colleagues in the compartment did not even have time to figure out what had happened?

Waiting is the natural state of the ancient transporter. He sank back into anticipation.

True, the transporter did not know what was waiting. It simply responded to every disturbance of space near itself - only its “close” meant a sphere into which the nameless star and its entire dwarf planetary system in addition freely fit.

Automata can wait.

Very long prologue

“We’ve arrived,” Veselov said neutrally. He always spoke as if he was doing the other person a favor. Or he was terribly dissatisfied with something.

“Thank you,” Pluzhnik responded with some malice.

Pluzhnik Veselov often irritated him - probably precisely because of this emphasized seriousness.

But you can't really yell at the foreman. And you won’t be very offended. More precisely, you can be offended as much as you like, but it will lead to absolutely nothing. If you are openly offended, you can also get ragged along the official line.

In general, Sanya Veselov suffered in silence.

Pluzhnik, more often referred to as “Timurych” in the team, nodded majestically and disappeared from the ghostly communication column above the console.

Veselov wrinkled his nose and stuck out his tongue into space.

The raider actually arrived at its destination - a standard small search engine of the Shuster Epsilon class. The crew is seven people, the pulsation range is up to eight hundred light years. In exceptional cases - up to one thousand two hundred. It was not recommended to move further; the X-drive began to go astray when pointing at the finishing sphere. The team of searchers on the raider was only partially staffed - instead of seven, there were only five. There weren't enough people, as usual. Therefore, the functions of the foreman and captain of the raider (and part-time doctor) were performed by the same person - Tahir Timurovich Pluzhnik, aka Te-Te-Pe, which most women on the earthly Base deciphered with resentment in their voices as “pulled-fucked-sent” " Because when he was drunk, Timurych really was greedy for the female sex and for some reason mystically irresistible, and the next morning, having sobered up, he always fell into melancholy and became terribly cynical, unkind and unbearable.