"Gardner,.James.Alan.-.Expendable" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

There were still times when the sight of his face made my skin crawl.


In the Halls (Part 1)


The halls were deserted at that hour. The ship only needed a twenty-person
running crew at night, and the on-duty crew members usually stayed close to
their posts. I loved to walk the empty corridors when the lights had been dimmed
and every door was closed. Neither Yarrun nor I spoke. The soft clopping of our
footsteps echoed lightly in the stillness of the sleeping ship.
Our ship was called the Jacaranda, named after a family of flowering trees
native to Old Earth. The previous captain had actually owned a jacaranda tree
and kept it in his quarters. When it was in bloom, he would pin a blossom to his
lapel every morning. The deep blue of the flower went well with khaki.
When our current captain took command, she said, "Get that damned thing out of
my room. It's shedding." The tree was moved to the cafeteria, where it got in
everyone's way and frequently dropped petals onto plates of food.
A few months later, the tree suddenly died. Someone probably poisoned it. The
crew held a party to celebrate the tree being reduced to proto-nute, and even I
attended. It was the first time I tasted Divian champagne.
Now the only jacarandas on ship were stylized ones stenciled on walls and doors.
The colors of these trees indicated the authorization needed to enter a given
area. I was allowed into areas marked with red jacarandas and black. I was not
permitted to enter rooms marked with orange, blue, green, yellow, purple, pink,
or brown.
Red areas were public ones like the cafeteria. Black areas were reserved for
Explorers and their equipment. The Admiralty denied that black had any special
significance.


Our Captain


The jacaranda on the door of the conference room was red. The door opened as it
heard our footsteps approach. Yarrun let me enter first-in public, we made a
point of observing rank protocol.
Captain Prope stood at the room's Star Window, apparently lost in thought. She
stared out on the star-filled blackness like the captain of a clipper ship
inhaling sea air from the foredeck: spine straight as iron, hands on hips, head
tilted back slightly so her chestnut-red hair hung free of her shoulders. If she
had been facing us, we would have likely seen her nostrils flared to the wind.
No doubt she had assumed this heroic pose several minutes ago, and had been
waiting impatiently for us to walk in. For some reason, she desperately wanted
to impress us.
The door closed behind us with a hiss. Prope took this as her cue to turn and
notice us. "Oh, come in, sit down, yes." She laughed lightly, a frothy little
laugh guaranteed by Outward Fleet Psych-techs to make subordinates feel like
equals. Prope was an ardent student of the Mechanics of Charisma.
"Sorry," she said. "My mind was somewhere else." She turned back for one more