"08 - Disaster (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hubbard L. Ron)

Heller closed the airlock.
He put the cat back on my chest.
Heller picked up a cordless microphone from the new controls that he had bared. "Take off and hold at altitude three hundred miles above New York," he told the tug.
It promptly and smoothly took off.
Heller went to the crew's galley and fixed himself a canister of hot jolt, which must have been his first taste of it in many months.
He came back to the other pilot chair, sat on its arm and watched the planet fall away.

Chapter 5

We were hovering at three hundred miles altitude, the lights of cities far below. The cat sat upon my chest and glared at me, just aching to rake my face with its savage claws. Heller had set a mate to Izzy's viewer-phone on the instrument ledge, the ball of the camera lens in it pointing past his face and up. He was waiting for Izzy's call. He was sitting in the local-pilot-maneuvering seat. He kept looking at the tug's instruments and then working a back scan of the space around.
"That's very odd," he said. "This panel is reading that there's a spaceship within a mile of us and I can't find it anywhere but in this warning light."
The breaker switch in my head! It was activating the emergency-collision light. Boltz had mentioned it. Heller must not suspect it was installed in me. He might have a hypnohelmet handy.
"Do you know if those assassin pilots took off?" asked Heller.
I was saved from discovery. And then a new inspiration hit me. Maybe in some way I could get him shot and escape. Yes, I could some way hide in the ship; he would go down the ladder and they'd see him and shoot him! "You better return to the Earth base," I answered. "The assassin pilots both took off after us. If you try to go further out than this, they'll kill you sure."
"I've got a job to do," said Heller. "I don't see their ships. This panel must be faulty." And he turned the warning light off.
"You'll get me killed," I said. "Those flying cannons can make nothing out of this unarmed tug."
"Get you killed?" said Heller. "That's a very attractive idea. The only reason you're alive right now is that you were too much of a coward to come out and fight when the others did. I told Raht you wouldn't."
"You're insulting me!" I said.
The cat raked me and I yelped.
"Don't push it, Gris," said Heller. "It was a very sad route that took you from an Academy man downhill to the 'drunks.' I never knew anyone could sink so low. I don't know what else you did to sabotage this mission or why you did it. And I'm not likely to forgive your luring the Countess Krak to her death. It's only regulations that I should return you to trial that keeps me from tossing you out that airlock."
I went giddy with the idea of falling three hundred miles and burning in the reentry to atmosphere—if I lived that long.
"It's no news to me that you are a fool," said Heller. "I knew that, that day in Spiteos. You requisitioned a blastick, obviously to kill poor Snelz. And you stood right there and let me swap an unloaded one for it with a simple sleight of hand, and you went right down and tried to fire it at Snelz.
"You tried to break me with some obvious thudder dice and didn't even know all you had to do was heat them up with shaking and they wouldn't work.
"We conned you left and right and I thought you were just a sort of demented idiot. I underrated you. You've got a vicious streak a light-year wide and a twist that ought to put you in an asylum.
"You must realize that from the first I have never been under your orders. If you recall, a combat engineer of the Fleet operates on his own cognizance. Under the authority of the Grand Council, I have been in charge of this mission from the first."
I saw an out. "What if the Grand Council revokes your orders?"
"They're in force until / am informed officially they have been revoked."
"You and your influence with the Grand Council," I sneered. "You and your (bleeped) code to Captain Roke!"
He looked at me. "Ah, so you were the one that ordered my suite raided at the Gracious Palms! You were looking for the platen! Raht didn't mention it. Well, there is no platen, Gris. The code contains only personal anecdotes that only he and I would know."
I kept very quiet. He did not know Captain Tars Roke had been sent to exile on Calabar. Let him dream. If he ever returned to Voltar, he was dead. Somehow I must stay alive. My feet were hurting me. "If you want to deliver a prisoner that isn't dead, you better get me to a doctor. I'm probably coming down with gangrene or lockjaw."
"That would be a blessing," said Heller. "But what's the matter?"
"My feet. They got infected and have had no care. I'll probably die on you unless you get me to the Earth base."
He sighed. You weren't supposed to kill prisoners on their way to a trial. You were supposed to deliver them alive.
For a fleeting moment I thought he would take the tug to Turkey, for he was standing up.
He lifted the cat off my chest. He began to unwind the ties that held me to the star-pilot seat.
He stood back. "Strip," he said.
For a wild moment I wondered if I should take a chance. There was no gun in his hand. Maybe if I lunged . . .
Just in time I realized he was laying a trap. He wanted an excuse to shoot me.
Shaking, I began to get out of my clothes.
"Phew!" he said. "Blazes, Gris, don't you ever bathe? The air was starting to clean up after the Antimancos, and now smell it."
"It smells all right to me," I said defensively.
"It would to a 'drunk,'" said Heller. "Look at that."
The cat was sneezing!
Heller eyed me with contempt. "Now, pick up those clothes, all of them, and dump them in that disintegrator. No, not your wallet, idiot."
Weakly, I surrendered it. He might find that Squeeza credit card, and that would lead him to discover that I had first kidnapped and then killed the Countess Krak. I felt quite ill.
I threw my ski suit in the disintegrator and followed it with my other clothes. I was naked except for the bandages on my feet.
He wasn't even pointing a gun at me. He herded me into the crew's shower and made me bathe, even wash my hair.
That done, he made me limp into the small crew first-aid room and lie down on the table. He yanked straps tight across my throat and hips and knees. He got out a pair of cutters and I was afraid he was going to torture me. But he was only cutting the bandages off my feet.
"That's pretty bad," he said. "Festered. Whatever were you walking in?"
"Goat dung," I said.