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

"To hell with this." Long ago Tobias had lost the ability to entertain himself with his own
company.
He sat up, still wearing his filthy flight suit, and slipped his feet into his icy boots. The
smell of his own body hung around him like a curse. There would be enough light from the Oids to
make it to the place where the stream was aboveground if he wanted to take a bath. He shivered at
the thought. What the hell. Everyone was being tracked by his own shadow of funk.
Keeping the thermal blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Tobias stepped outside. The Oids were
bright in the night sky. Maybe they should use the computer to plot the Oids. There was a lot of
crap out there, all in the same orbit. Some fine day maybe one of those three-hundred-kilometer-
long chunks of rock might slam into the middle of their camp. He spat on the ground. "And if we
knew, what could we do about it?"


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There was a light on in the wreckage of the ship. Tobias began moving his feet in that direction.
The other individual shelters were dark. The main shelter had a light on, but no one was inside
the dome. The open cargo hatch in the belly of the ship glowed with a dim red. Whoever was in the
ship, it wouldn't be Cage. The computer man had a thing about conserving the ship's batteries. He
would never leave on a light that wasn't needed. As though it made any difference. The batteries
would outlive them all.
Tobias entered the cargo bay and began working his way around and through the jumble of opened
containers and their scattered contents.
Most of it had been destined for a low-budget evaluation mission on some steamy planet out there
somewhere. Everything anyone would need to learn the learnable about a planet and then screw it
up. They had found the shelters and rations there.
Forward of the cargo hatch another light burned above a stack of strange equipment that Tobias had
never seen before. Must have come from the cargo. Cables ran from the stack through the crew's
quarters toward the cockpit. He entered the corridor to the crew's quarters, his mind thumbing
through the obvious as he trudged up the slight incline to the cockpit.
If a full. crew had been on board, maybe. If Mikizu hadn't overestimated his and his ship's
abilities, maybe. If they'd followed company policy and stayed the hell out of the Oids, maybe. If
they hadn't been ordered out of their way to pick up the passengers, maybe. Maybe. If. If ending
it on this dreary rock wasn't such a fitting end to a dreary life. If.
He could hear no sound forward except for the almost inaudible whine of the power converter. He
stopped at the hatch to the cockpit and peered in.
Lady Name's back was toward him. She was sitting back, watching, almost hypnotized by the patterns
appearing upon the display. Every few moments the image would switch to columns of figures and
then back to the patterns.
He stepped into the cockpit. "Hey, Lady. What're you up to?"
She whirled about, the needle-pointed blade in her right hand. As he froze, a slow grin appeared
on her face. "You shouldn't sneak up on me that way, Tobias. You almost got to do your pension as
a eunuch." She lowered the blade. "Why are you here?"
His gaze still fixed on the knife, Tobias worked his way to the commo station couch and sat down.
"I couldn't sleep anymore. Thought Cage's machine might have something to read."
She turned back to the display over the keyboard. "This terminal is busy."
"Are any of the other stations hooked up?"
She didn't answer. He watched her for a moment, then turned his attention to the display. "Does
that have anything to do with the gear you've hooked up in