"Charles Ingrid - The Sand Wars 01 - Solar Kill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ingrid Charles)

eternity—there was a planet within view and, in a few months, he might even drift close enough for its gravity to snag
him and pull him down. It went without saying that Jack wouldn’t be alive to find out if he was right or not.
He considered his com equipment, wondering if he should put out an SOS. It took little energy, was solar-powered,
and up to optimum, so he kicked the chin lever that put out the transmission. Eerily, he couldn’t hear it, so he could
only assume the suit broadcast what he was telling it to.
Jack spent the rest of his time sweating, hearing things, and being angry. It was the anger that kept him sane ... and so
he fed it, because he didn’t like the aching fear of the suit, and he was worried that he was actually hearing what he
thought he was. It was a low, scratchy mumbling, just beyond the range of his senses, and he didn’t know if he really
heard anything or not, like a ghosted-transmission. Just a spidery, whispery kind of noise. It made no difference to him
that the suit embraced him like a long-lost lover, that wearing it brought back a kind of easy familiarity, that it nestled
him close and kept him alive.
“Sarge, what happens if the Milots got to my suit, too, and put those—those parasites into it and even now I’m
hatching them and they’ll consume me and I’ll be like Bilosky, dead, and then a lizard berserker, like you, Sarge?”
“Ya don’t wanna know.”
“But, Sarge—what if it’s true? What if it happens? What if it’s going to happen to me?”
“Don’t ask.”
“But Sarge ... I can feel something tickling the back of my neck!”
“Fifty laps, kid, and then, if you still want to ask a question, ask why some jerk of a commander sent you dirtside to
Milos, and then left you there to die? Ask that one.”
“Ya don’t wanna know why, sergeant,” Jack said wearily. He licked his lips for the hundredth time and felt his stomach
do an elegant zero-grav flip-flop as the suit rolled over again.
“You don’t want to know the answer to that one.
“No, but you do. Jack. And you’d better stay alive to ask it, this time. They shut you up with seventeen years of cold
sleep and two years of hospitalization and rehab, but they ain’t shutting up this time. There’s nobody else left to ask
the question this time. Jack my boy—and you’ve already done your fifty laps. And—hell! While you’re at it, ask them
what happened to Claron!”
His dazed voice echoed inside his plate, and he realized he was still suited up. How long now? How long had he been
talking to himself. He shook. Carefully, he withdrew his right hand from his glove, the missing metacarpal bothered him
with a ghost of sensation, and he wiped the trickling sweat on his face. Heat dissipation still a problem inside a suit. He
grinned without humor. While he had his hand out, he checked the SOS beam. Still on. Had anybody heard him?
Somebody had better hear him, because he wanted to live!
The scratchy whispering had stopped. Had he only imagined it? How long had he imagined himself back in Basic?
How long had he been tumbling out here?
He spread out. Below him was a canopy of stars. To his two o’clock, the glowing blue ball of a planet which just might
snag him in—if he could afford to wait for months. He couldn’t. The suit wasn’t made for it, and neither was he. And
even if he got close enough, who said the planetholders down below were equipped to pick up a reading on him, and
dash out to save him?
He slipped his hand back inside the glove and flexed the fingers. Jack decided to go back to talking to himself. After
all, staying angry was as good as staying sane, until he came to the end.
“Holy shit,” Tubs exclaimed, his fat fingers playing over the sensor keyboard of the Montreal. He’d been looking for
trouble dirtside—they were strikebreakers after all, going in to bust up a planet, but he hadn’t expected to sense
anything this far out. A mine, perhaps. He waved frantically for Short-Jump to attend him at the screen.
“What is it?”
“I’m tracking the god-damndest piece of space junk I’ve ever seen.”
“A mine?”
“I thought so at first, but don’t know now.”
Short-Jump frowned and leaned in over Tubs’ shoulder. He was uglier than sin, so ugly it was hard to find a woman
who’d look at him twice unless he got a short jump head start, hence his nickname. He wrinkled his spatulate nose.
“Hell, that’s a suit. Probably deader’n last week’s soya rations.”
“A scab maybe? Jettisoned out here as a warning?”