Read McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS for Free Online

visible against the backdrop of space was the Crab Nebula. The ghostly apparition covered half the sky, with the supernova remnant clearly visible at its center. Some claimed to be able to see the remnant actually pulsate… unlikely, since the neutron star at its center rotated 30 times each second.
    “How can something so ugly be beautiful at the same time?” Lisa Rykand asked her husband as the two of them cuddled on their too-narrow bed and watched Sutton grow ever larger on their cabin screen.
    “Cognitive dissonance,” he replied. “We were out too long this time.”
    “Well, we made it home and we’ll have thirty days before we have to go out again.”
    He groaned. “Don’t remind me! Let’s live in the present for awhile. I wonder what new amusements they’ve set up since we’ve been gone?”
    “I’m sure the recreation center has the usual array of well-thumbed playing cards and chess sets missing no more than a piece or two. Then, of course, there’s the booze.”
    “There is that,” he agreed.
    Space Navy regulations were very specific when it came to being intoxicated on duty… specific and draconian. When the art of distillation was as easy as hooking up a plastic tube to the nearest vacuum spigot, the powers-that-be controlled drunkenness in the same way the British Navy had once handled the problem. They became the sole authorized distributor of alcohol.
    Daedalus had been out three full months this trip. Their routine was the same as on every other voyage. They would sneak into the traffic flow in some Broan system, and then jump from gate to gate to gate until they ran out of recording space in the computer.
    And so, in addition to Broan traffic of all sorts, there were a dozen or so human craft traversing the stargate network at any given time. By pretending to be locals, they could survey star systems faster than more surreptitious methods allowed. Even so, they were not getting the job done quickly enough.
    The problem was that the Broan domain was too damned large! The human fleet, operating at the end of a year-long supply line, could easily spend several lifetimes poking around on the fringes of enemy star systems. And the more they did so, the more likely that they would be detected, or worse, one of them would be captured.
    It was a scenario that kept the Q-ship crews on edge the whole time they were in Broan space… and kept their Captains’ hands never far from the self-destruct switch wired to a small nuke welded to the ship’s keel.
    Mark Rykand and his wife snuggled together and watched the approach to Sutton parking orbit. Since the moon was airless, ships could orbit close to the surface; so close, in fact, that it sometimes looked as though they would clip the tops of the moon’s Alpine-size mountains.
    As Daedalus used a staccato burst of attitude control jets to slide into its assigned orbital slot, the view shifted. A large spherical shape lay at the center of the screen. It floated stationary while Sutton’s surface swept past in a blur of motion behind it. The big freighter wore a ring of silver around its hull, giving it the look of a bald man with a hat perched at a jaunty angle.
    “What the hell is that?” Mark asked.
    Lisa was quiet for a few seconds, and then laughed.
    “It’s a stargate!”
    “So it is!” Mark exclaimed. “They actually snagged one while we were gone!”
    #
    One thing you had to say about the Space Navy, once a ship returned from a long, arduous patrol, they wasted no time in emptying it out. Save for a minimum watch on the bridge and in the engine spaces, the rest of the crew crowded into the three ground-to-orbit boats that arrived to take them down to Sutton.
    Mark and Lisa managed to squirm into one of the bare acceleration shelves on the third transport along with two space bags.
    “Happy, Darling?” she asked as she snuggled closer and gave him a brief kiss on the lips.
    “Ecstatic,” he replied. “Somehow this canned air