"Kay Kenyon - Maximum Ice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenyon Kay)

Love and thanks to my husband, Thomas Overcast, my first reader and so much else.

PROLOGUE
It was a cold homecoming. By some accounts, no homecoming at all. After 250 years, Star Road's crew
were prepared to be strangers to earth, but not like this.

Captain Anatolly Razo sat well away from the porthole, his face averted from the view. He kept a watch
instead on the physio chamber, where Zoya was at last beginning to wake up. The view of Ship Mother
was much preferable to the other. Her eyelids trembled, as the realm of stasis held her for a few more
moments. When you'd been asleep for fifty-four years, waking up was no simple matter.

The lid of the chamber had been removed, and the med offi-cer had been running revitalization lines for
several hours. Ship Mother Zoya Kundara lay on her right side, her dark hair now carefully brushed
away from her face. The diamonds in her left ear glinted like a control panel.

The captain withdrew his hand from Zoya's shoulder, resist-ing the urge to nudge her as if from a night's
sleep. He was both eager for her to wake and dreading it. As captain, it was his task to tell her the news.
He thought of opening lines, all of them bad.

At seventy-eight, Anatolly Razo had never struggled to ex-press himselfтАФexcept in Zoya Kundara's
presence.

"Dim the lights," he told his assistant. Zoya was sensitive to light on awakening.

The med officer gave some advice: "Music helps."

Nothing helps, the captain thought, but nodded an assent.

Violin music flooded the room. It was a traditional piece, the music of the Rom, his gypsy people. The
soaring melody moved him to take Zoya's hand. It was still cool. He rubbed her hand between his own,
gazing at her still-youthful face, her dark beauty. She was thirty-six years old, with high cheek-bones, an
aquiline nose, and a glorious figure. His heart crimped a little, looking at her. But all that was long past.
Half a century past.

During those decades Star Road had pursued its homeward journey, much of it under his captaincy.
They were eager to come home. They must come home. On a vessel that had begun its journey with
7000 men, women, and children, 1146 crew mem-bers remained. To be sure, it was a gradual decline,
measured by the death rate of a robust peopleтАФrobust in all ways but one.

Zoya stirred, mumbling something. She waved at the tubes around her, as though parting cobwebs. Her
eyes opened. Deep brownтАФtrailing dreams, the captain thought. She looked around the cabin,
registering reality.

Her voice was a scrape. "How long?"

"Fifty-four years," the captain answered, making his voice gentle. It was an awful pronouncement, but it
was the truth. He never understood how she could bear itтАФthis waking and long sleep and waking again.
It took a toll on her body, and no doubt, on her soul. But gypsy women were tough. After all, they had to
live with gypsy men.