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

be processed and packed without danger of spoilage. The crew goes through the
job in about twenty minutes, firing their gas hoses into the net.

They claim that this time, the fish fired back.

I've watched the tapes, I attended the interrogations . . . the officers
scoured
the hold with everything but an electron microscope. There was no weapon. No
perpetrator. No fish, either; the net was unmoored in the fracas and dropped
back into the ocean. Half a million dollars rained back into the soup and swam
as fast as fins could carry them to the deepest, blackest crevasse in the sea.
It reflects on us, not the cyborg officers; despite their general disinterest
in
shipboard affairs, the Company holds them to be infallible.
The tapes, as usual, are useless. Nothing but gouts of red light ripping
through
the sudden torrent of fish, ethylene canisters howling out their contents
without hands to control the flow, men screaming, James Freedman burning. It
was
obviously a nasty little T-rod that did the job, the sort of laser mining
torch
that sailors can buy in any port in the system -- nastier than most. I've got
a
man laid out in my lab who's missing most of the left side of his body. Your
average black market laser can't generate that kind of power.

It doesn't matter. Jones has gone insane. He must have dropped his weapon into
the water after firing it at Freedman -- or perhaps, much less likely, after
firing at a man standing on the other side of the hold. The walls are polished
steel; it's not strictly impossible that they could have reflected the energy,
some kind of ricochet effect. Jones was standing one man over from Freedman at
the time. This is the current consensus: the beams coming out of the net would
be just an illusion caused by darkness, gas, confusion.

No sense can be extracted from Jones at all. After the last frenzied assertion
that someone in the net was shooting at him, I put him down. His constitution
is
such that no tranquilizer will hold for long; it may be more economical to put
him back into suspension for the duration of the trip. Of course, the extra
time
will partially drain his tank, but it's more than possible to transfer him to
his son's berth for the journey home. Or Freedman's, for that matter.

We're behind, thanks to this appalling accident. We'll have to bring in
another
load before we can climb the well and get off this spinning ball of slush, and
then take the short way home in order to make it in on schedule. The cargo is
already promised to half a dozen hungry worlds. If we don't deliver, I can say
goodbye to any chance of leaving this kind of duty; for that matter, I might
pull worse. I'm the sci-med on this scow, for what it's worth -- an officer,