"Barry Longyear - Adagio (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Longyear Barry)

flight suit. He turned and looked down at the grave marker he had been sitting on. Osborn's
marker. It was a smooth, red stone just like Mikizu's.
They had to use only the red stones for grave markers. They didn't walk off.
The gray stone Tobias had originally used to mark Osborn's grave was now several meters downslope,
running like hell, Forrest claimed. It had taken the gray stone five of the planet's month-long
days to race the short distance. Gray stones, white stones, green stones, black stones. They
littered the red landscape. They were alive. The red ones didn't move.
They were dead.
Osborn was dead. And Mikizu. He let his gaze wander two meters to the left to another red stone.
When Mikizu had piloted the ship, shearing it off that ledge, he had lost his head. Tobias knew
because he had carried that head to the grave while Forrest and Cage carried the pilot's
remainder.
Too quick, Tobias thought. Too quick and clean a death for you, Mikizu. Tobias unsealed his suit


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and pissed on the pilot's grave. When he was finished he stumbled down the hill, entered his
individual shelter, and flopped down on his cot. He closed his eyes thinking of dead red grave
markers.
Osborn was dead. Mikizu was dead. Mikizu was no loss. If it hadn't been for him they wouldn't be
stranded. But Osborn. Tobias wished Osborn were still alive. He'd know what to do. But Osborn had
to be a hero ....
He had sat in the sputtering flashes of the emergency lights, watching Osborn's eyeballs leak. The
chief engineer was in the wreckage of the engineering deck, inhaling vacuum, the seat of his
trousers puddling with piss and blood, the fluid from his eyeballs dribbling down his cheeks.
There had been plenty of time for Osborn to get on his suit. The hull damage in aft engineering
had dumped only the pressure from that compartment. The rest of the ship lost pressure only
because of the warped bulkhead seals. It took minutes for the ship to lose cabin pressure. But
Osborn wanted to flick switches, punch buttons, and twirl knobs. The rest of
them probably owed him their lives. The asshole.
"Tobias?" The headset in his suit spoke. It was the pilot, Mikizu. "Engineering? Osborn? Tobias?"
Tobias answered. "What?"
"Osborn?"
"Osborn's dead."
A brief pause. "Tobias, I need to know the power situation."
Through his suit's faceplate, he glanced at the remains of the engineering board. "I can't help
but believe, Mikizu, that you know just about as much as I do about that."
"The bridge panel is dead."
"No shit." He leaned back against the bulkhead, glanced at Osborn, and closed his eyes. "We're all
dead back here, too."
"I need power if we're going to go down."
"Is there any point?"
"Forrest thinks so."
Forrest. Second pilot. A little bastard but smart. Tobias shook his head to clear it. Time to
knock off the smartmouth.
"Main and auxiliary plants are down. Whatever it was that came flying through the hull took out
the engines. I couldn't sell what's left of them for scrap."
Another pause, this one longer. "What about the fuel cells?"