"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 01 - Expendable" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

rest of the ship slept.

The message buzzer hummed softly in the quiet of my cabin. I turned a dial on my desktop. "Ramos
here."

The face of Lieutenant Harque, the captain's aide, sprang to life on the screen. Harque had an easy smile
and curly good looks, a boy-next-door handsomeness that let him win over people without having a
speck of true charm in his self-important body. "The captain would like to see you, Explorer."

"Yes?"

"In the conference room. As soon as possible."
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




"Does she want me to bring Yarrun?"

"I've already contacted Yarrun. Harque out." The picture went blank.

Typical. I had come to expect that sort of thing from Harque. If I confronted him about it, he would
claim he was saving me trouble by calling my subordinate for me. I slid back my chair and sighed as I
headed for the door.

The light over my desk turned off behind me. It did that automatically. The quick return to darkness
always made me think the lamp was eager to see me go.




My Subordinate


Yarrun was waiting for me outside the door. His eyes were blearyтАФhe must have been asleep when
Harque buzzed him. Yarrun preferred an early bedtime. To compensate, he got up hours before anyone
else was awake. He said he enjoyed the quiet of the ship in the early morning.

I don't know what he did with the time he had to himself. Perhaps he just tended his own collectionтАФhe
collected dyed silk.

Explorer Second Class Yarrun Derigha was officially my subordinate because he graduated from the
Academy three years after I did. Unofficially, we were equal partners. We worked as a team, the only
two Expendable Crew Members among eighty-seven Vacuum crew members too valuable to be wasted.

Yarrun was missing the left side of his face. To be precise, the left half of his jaw never formed and the
right hadn't grown since he was six. The result looked like half a head, with the skin stretched taut from
his left cheekbone to his partial right jaw.

There was nothing else wrong with Yarrun. His brain was intact. His Intelligence Profile ranked higher