"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 04 - Hunted" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

We had crossed the line, and the whole crew was dead. Even the woman who called me angel.

It made my eyes sting: that she died kissing a complete stranger.

I laid her body onto the floor as gently as I could. "I'm sorry," I said. "If the League of Peoples wanted
to kill someone for being bad..." I looked around the room at the corpses. "Sorry," I told them all. "I
thought it would be me."




2

INSPECTING MY COMMAND


I couldn't think of what to do next, so I just sat down on the floor beside the admiral woman. People
look so helpless when they're dead—like they're expecting you to make it all better. Any other time, I
might have tried CPR to start the woman's heart again; but it wouldn't work now. When the League of
Peoples kills you, you stay dead.

Dead forever, the woman who kissed me. And everyone else. So quiet: the music had stopped when the
gonging began, and now there was no one to tell the sound system, "Resume play." The lounge walls
continued to show Italian masqueraders laughing and dancing in feathered masks, but they were just silent
pictures.
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No sound.

No breathing.

You don't know how much you miss the sound of breathing till it's not there.

In all that silence, I desperately wanted todo something. Help these poor people. But all I could think of
was wiping the little saliva string from the admiral woman's cheek. So that's the useless stupid thing I did.

When I looked at my finger, some of the purple splotch had come off on my skin. I rubbed the woman's
face again; the splotch was a waxy sort of makeup she must have put on for the party. Was it the popular
fashion now to wear big garish blobs? Or was the admiral woman like the man in pink pajamas, dressed
up to imitate somebody I didn't know?

The woman might not be an admiral at all. Maybe this was just another costume.

I wanted to wash her face: scrub off the gunk so she'd look like herself. Underneath, she might have
been pretty. But when people died, you weren't supposed to touch them.Contact Security and leave
the site undisturbed —that's what they always said in VR stories when things went terribly wrong.