"Arinn Dembo - Sisterhood Of Skin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dembo Arinn)

It leaped over and over, until it became exhausting to watch. That fabulous
strength.

She was too big to fit easily on the operating table. As the men shoved and
dragged the great golden corpse this way and that, trying to get it on the
slab,
I had to think of Wayland Jones -- Jones the Younger-- or rather, the pitiful
remnant which I had examined a few weeks ago; there was nothing left of him
but
his arm.

I've drawn my pistol twice on this voyage. I had to force Benito "Bunny"
Vicarro
to shinny out to the end of the bowsprit at gunpoint in order to recover that
arms it was frozen to a steel safety rung, and the fingers had to be pried off
with a knife. Vicarro cried through the whole operation. I'm sure he thought
it
was vengeance for getting the Jones boy killed. Not true: he was the natural
choice. The man is as graceful as a gibbon.

Wayland Jones came out on this trip with his father. He'd never been fishing
"off the rock" before-- that is, off his home planet. I don't remember much
about him, sadly. He shared his father's terse, powerful genetic code: thick
body, heavy arms, bandy legs, mastiff's jaw. A product of unusually high
gravity. He had all of his father's virtues as a seaman and a fisherman,
without
the temper so far as I could tell. He also had dark, curly hair-- a gift from
his mother, whoever she may have been.

Hazing is the rule on a first voyage. I'm sure that Jones, Vicarro and
Templeton
thought nothing of making the poor kid crawl out on the bowsprit to knock off
the icicles forming on the gigantic pole --without telling him that it would
all
melt off in seconds if we sent out a burst transmissions the Albatross can
generate several gigawatts of power. Jones Jr. gamely hugged the pylon and
bumped his way slowly out over the sea: a hammer in one hand, finding his grip
with the other, while the freezing spindle plunged sickeningly over the waves.

I was in the foc's'le tower, looking over our satellite photographs of the
area,
trying to locate the next school of "fish" in the feeding grounds. I saw Jones
Jr. when I happened to look out the window; he had already gone quite a
distance
from the main body of the ship. He was hugging the transmitter and flailing at
the underside with a mallet.

I went to the com to tell him to get the hell off before he got himself
killed.
The waters of this planet are full of fluorocarbons; they freeze at an