"Steve Perry - Aliens 02 - Nightmare Asylum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Could be a malfunction, asshole, the little voice in his head said with a smirk. Could be
you’re all gonna die.
Fuck you, Wilks told the voice. I got business to finish before I die.
And you think the universe cares about your business?
Fuck you, pal. You and the id you rode in on.
The voice rewarded him with a nasty laugh.
 2
Mitch rested in the cradle they had improvised for him, and from behind it appeared that he
was sitting up. Given that there was nothing left of his body from the waist down, sitting wasn’t
exactly possible. He stopped in the middle, almost literally half a man—half an android—a ragged
medifoam blob sealing his innards shut. He had done the repairs on his circulatory tubules himself,
shunting, reconnecting, so that he was once again a closed system. That was how he’d put it, a
closed system. The other half of him had been left on the aliens’ homeworld, torn off by a maddened
drone protecting its nest. That alien was killed and likely it and most of the others there were
vaporized by the subsequent atomic explosions Wilks had left them as a going away gift. A man torn
asunder as Mitch had been would have died on that hellish planet, from blood loss or maybe shock.
Androids were built better.
He heard her come in. This was the starboard computer access compartment, smaller even
than the place where she’d just left Wilks. He heard her, but pretended he had not.
“Mitch?”
He shook his head. “I can’t get past the operating system,” he said. “Navigation access code is
sixty-five digits, backed up by a second code of forty numbers. It would take forever to get it, given
the hardware I’ve got. And where are the other ships? We left Earth in the middle of an armada.
They should be somewhere around here, but they aren’t. We’re alone. It doesn’t make any sense.”
She moved to stand next to his cradle. Resisted the impulse to stroke his hair. “It’s all right—”
“No, it isn’t all right! We don’t know where we are, where we’re going, if we’ll get there alive!
I have to, it’s my function to…” he trailed off. Shook his head again.
Billie wanted to cry, something she’d done more of in the last week than ever in her life. His
Function. She’d fallen in love with an android. Worse, maybe, he’d fallen in love with her. He was
having more trouble dealing with the feelings than she was. When they’d gone into the sleep
chambers, she’d accepted it, believed it would be all right, somehow. But when they’d come out,
something had changed. Some of it was him. Some of it, she had to admit, was her.
She didn’t think she was one of those people who carried her prejudices around like a club,
bashing those who disagreed with her. She’d always paid lip service to equality. A person is a
person, no matter if they’re born of woman, incubated in an artificial womb, or made in the android
vats. Where you came from wasn’t important, only where you were going. Spend too much time
looking back, you’d run into something and brain yourself, right? She’d always said that. Androids
were people.
Yeah, but would you want your sister to marry one?
Or would you want to marry one yourself?
Jesus.
He hadn’t told her, that was his main crime. She’d only found out after they had become
lovers, after she had let him into her heart. That hurt. She hadn’t thought she could ever get past that,
but amazingly, she had. Or so she had thought. But now?
It wasn’t just that he was less than he had been. With the proper facilities, Mitch could be
made whole again. As good as new. Meticulously designed muscles, perfect skin, all the right
equipment in the right places…
Stop it!
No, there was something else going on here and Billie didn’t know exactly what. The
man—artificial or not—she had fallen in love with wasn’t the same as he had been. Something inside