"Jody Lynn Nye - Medecine Show" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nye Jody Lynn)

delay them. For two days it's been irking me what was wrong with what should have been a lovely
moment. Someone was watching the communications net, waiting for a clue to where we were. And
they got it. And here they are.
Shona could see the moment replayed in her mind over and over again like a looped piece of data. It was
her own fault. All she'd had to do was reach out and stop the master of the shipyard from entering that
last keystroke, ask him to wait until they'd lifted ship, and darn it, she hadn't.
She was flung against the bulkhead as Gershom negotiated a braking turn, putting on the port aft
thrusters and firing the starboard rockets forward. The much bulkier ship responded ever so slightly
more slowly than she had before. Even Shona could sense it. She knew the other crew members were
hanging on in agony, urging the ship forward with their very wills. Too late, lines of warning lights
illumined down the corridor, stepping in series toward emergency stations. Howls, both mechanical and
animal, resounded off the metal-and-plastic walls. She handed herself the rest of the way into her lab as
a crash shook the ship. They'd taken a hit, but no sirens wailed.
"Thank goodness, not a hull breach,'' Shona thought, then realized she'd spoken aloud. She swung in the
door of the laboratory module. With its hull made of space-grade ceramic and its reinforced metal
skeleton, it was the safest place on the ship.
Her foster daughter, Leilani, looked up with huge dark eyes. The girl had been trying to urge Shona's
shaggy black dog, Saffie, into her crash cage set against the bulkhead underneath the worktable. The big
dog didn't want to go, and was scrabbling at the padding with desperate feet. She whined at her mistress
through the thick mesh as Lani latched the door behind her.
"Who is it?" Lani asked, hurrying to catch Shona's Abys-sinian cat, Harry, who saw involuntary
imprisonment ahead of him and was obstinately staying out of reach. The howls of distress were coming
from him.
"Mama!"
Shona grabbed up her two-year-old son, Alexander, who was toddling unsteadily along the perimeter of

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 Jody Lynn Nye - Medicine Show


the room, handing himself along the cabinets in true spacer fashion. With deft Fingers, she slipped him
into a papoose-style carrier attached to the wall and strapped him in.
"There you go, sweetie," Shona said, pecking him swiftly on the cheek. He reached for her, but she
turned away to help gather up the other animals. The rabbits and mice were in their boxes. Only the cat
remained free.
"Mama, down!"
"There he goes, Lani." Shona dropped to her knees and crawled toward the corner where Harry had
spotted an open cabinet door to hide behind. Together they lunged. Shona snapped the door shut, and
Lani tackled Harry. As the cat protested shrilly, they locked him up in the crash cage next to Saffie.
There was one more warm body to be accounted for. "Where's Chirwl?"
The ship changed direction again, and mother and daughter slewed across the floor. Shona helped Lani
crawl on all fours to the crash seats on the opposite side of the room and buckled the restraints around
her.
"Is it him?" Lani asked in a whisper, looking around.
"How could it be?" Shona said, without having to ask which "him."
"He's in prison." Lani shivered, and Shona put a gentle hand on the girl's arm. A normally cheerful
woman of thirty, Shona glanced about her with worried brown eyes. Two smile lines, like single
quotation marks at the corners of her gener-ously made mouth, indented sharply in concern. The fact
that he was in prison billions of klicks away didn't mean they were out of the reach of Jachin Verdadero,
and they both knew it.