"C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley - The Small Pond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lowe C Sanford)

clothing touched—utterly humiliated in front of her friends in a format so public and
genteel that she couldn’t even have thought of screaming.
Well, she could scream now! Out in the woods over a kilometer from the
nearest other home, she spun in her bed, flung her arms out, and screamed a
nameless, primal scream until her throat hurt.
“Liz?”
She caught her breath and screamed again.
“Liz, are you okay?”
It was David. Chaos, she was no mood to be social.
“Are you okay?”
“Does it sound like it?” she snapped, and regretted it. Suddenly, she didn’t
want to be alone. “Oh, come on in.”
He came through the short entrance maze and walked under the dome rim just
as large gray raindrops began to splash all over it, drumming in a way that made it
sound like more of a storm than it was. She got up to meet him and collapsed on
him, sobbing.
He held her until she collected herself.
Finally, when her face had dried and she’d started thinking again, he
disengaged slightly and put a hand on her chin. “Liz, it has been three days. Have
you eaten anything?”
Three days? She could still taste the emu in her mouth.
“We are all concerned,” David said, “but we are being very circumspect.
Mutori wants you to know she had no idea this would happen. Judi is terrified.”
“I haven’t had a message from her since...”
David nodded. “We think Gunheim is monitoring bioradio. One wrong move
and Oscar is in cold sleep on the next starship to his father. Look, I’m
uncomfortable.” He waved his hands around him and smiled wryly. “What do you
do about bugs in here?”
“All the insects here are genetically engineered to avoid human pheromones so
I don’t need...” Liz thought about the other kind of bugs, then shrugged her
shoulders. “Oh. You want to take a walk in the rain?”
David smiled and nodded. The rain was warm and the forest was full of
wonderful, wet fragrances. About a hundred meters along the path to the river, he
turned to her.
“Okay,” she said, to herself as much as to David. “What are my options?”
“Your options? For what?”
“To get back in charge of the project. To put Gunheim in his place. To get
my life back.”
“Brainstorm?”
“Yeah. Let’s have some ideas. Everything on the table. I could kill the
bastard. Don’t look at me that way; we’ll deselect later. Maybe we could just kidnap
him, put him on ice until after the impactor flies.”
David shrugged but didn’t look very encouraging.
“Okay. Am I good in bed? Good enough so that someone as experienced as
Gunheim would do stuff for me?”
“Liz, you are not serious...”
“It’s on the table.”
“I am not experienced enough to know. You are only my third lover and it is
hard for me to tell.”
“Well, it’s on the table, anyway.”