"Steve Perry - Aliens 01 - Earth Hive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

dead of old age. There ain’t no air in there and if by some miracle somebody is home, they’re in a
suspension tank. And aside from that, this thing has about thirty minutes before it hits enough
atmosphere to boil lead. Pop it.”
Lyle shrugged. Touched controls.
The probe attached a small charge to the hatch and retroed back a hundred meters. The
charge flared silently in the vacuum and the hatch shattered.
“Knock, knock. Anybody home?”
“Go see. And try not to bang the probe up too bad this time.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Lyle said. “One of the retros was plugged.”
“So you say.”
The tiny robot ship moved in through the opening in the derelict ship.
“Inner hatch is open.”
“Good. Saves time. Move it in.”
The probe’s halogens lit as it moved into the ship.
The radiation alarm chimed on the computer’s screen. “Kinda hot in there,” Lyle said.
“Yep, hope you like your soypro well done.”
“Mmm. I guess anybody in this baby would be toast by now. We’ll have to give the probe a
bath when it gets back.”
“Chreesto, look at that!” Barton said.
What had been a man floated just ahead of the probe. The hard radiation had killed the
bacteria that would have rotted him, and the cold had preserved what the vacuum hadn’t sucked out
of him. He looked like a leather prune. He was naked.
“Lordy, lordy,” Lyle said. “Hey, check the wall behind him.” He touched a control and the
visuals enhanced and enlarged. Something was written on the bulkhead in smeary brown letters:
KILL US ALL, it said.
“Damn, is that written in blood? Looks like blood tome.”
“You want an analysis?”
“Never mind. We got us a flip ship.”
Lyle nodded. They’d heard about them, though he himself had never opened one. Somebody
went nuts and wasted everybody else. Opened a port and let the air out, or maybe flooded the ship
with radiation, like this one. A quick death or a slow one, but death, sure enough. Lyle shivered.
“Find a terminal and see if you can download the ship’s memory. The meter is running here.”
“If the batteries are still good. Oops. Got motion on the detector.”
“I see it. I don’t believe it, but I see it. Nobody can possibly be alive, even somebody in a full
rad suit would cook in this tub—”
“There it is. It’s just a cargo carrier.”
A short, squat robot crawled along a line of Velcro against the ceiling.
“We must have jolted it awake when we blew the hatch.”
“Yeah, right. Get the memory.”
The probe floated toward a control panel.
“Damn, look at those holes in the deck. Looks like something dissolved the plastic. Radiation
wouldn’t do that, would it?”
 “Who knows? Who cares? Just dump the memory and pull the probe so we can blow this
sucker. I have a date tonight and I don’t want any overtime.”
“You’re the commander.”
The probe connected to the control board. The ship’s power was almost gone, but sufficient to
download the memory.
“Coming in,” Lyle said. “Here’s the ID scan, onscreen.”
“No surprises here,” Barton said. “Type five nuke drive, lotta deep-space time, bad shields,
dead core. No wonder they junked this bucket. That’s it. Shove it sunward, set the 10-CA and let’s