"Katharine Kerr - Resurrection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

ISBN 0-553-29834-8

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Diane Henriksen

Who overcame something too much like this.


RESURRECTION
CHAPTER ONE

Except for the clammy feel of electrodes pasted to her forehead and the nape of her neck, and the
weight of the monitors and boosters slung over her shoulders, Tiffany enjoys the repatterning drills of
neuro rehab, a string of video games, especially now that she's advanced to Stage Two. Stage One got
old fast, staring at the holo screen while she tried to slide the red arrow inside the green ring or drop the
yellow ball into the blue cup. Here in Stage Two a little purple alien pops in and out of a
three-dimensional maze while an assortment of monsters tries to eat him. Every now and then he finds
rocks to throw, and every hit scores big points. She has been promised various refinements in this
scenario if she can get him out of the maze and into the next section of the game world. So far, he's been
eaten at the exit every time.

While he runs and finds and throws, the boosters gleam with red numbers or hum to themselves as they
fire bursts of electricity into her nervous system; the monitors beep and click, chasing her neural
responses down endless mazes and cornering the booster pulses at all the dead-ends left in her brain by
the crash, or rather, the ground impaction event, as the Air Force prefers to call it. The purple alien runs
straight into the mouth of a green dragon-ish thing as Tiffany's mind skips and shies.A hot, still day over
the Mediterranean, a hot still day over the desert. She was on patrol. Not ferrying. Patrol. All at once, at
seven o'clock high, screaming out of the sun on a suicide mission over Israel, hostiles . The monitor
produces a cascade of beeps and tinny shrieks as her fingers lie still on the console.Crashed, shot down,
failed, burning, spiraling, failed .

No matter what anyone tells her, she sees herself as a loser, though how she could have possibly won a
dogfight in a half-armed plane she cannot say. She's been told repeatedly that she had no missiles on
board and only enough ammunition for a couple of warning shots; she was never supposed to fight, not
her, a woman, not her, a mere ferryman, flying a new F-47D to a base behind the lines for the men to
take into combat. A perfectly reasonable excuse, this, except that she remembers testing her missile
activation codes when she was preparing for takeoff. Remembers testing her cannon, too. Remembers
them all checking out just fine. Remembers being a combat pilot, not a ferryman. And then remembers тАФ
not defeat, no, not exactly. This part of the story she can never quite explain, not even to herself. She
remembers only lying on the ground dying while seeing the power plant she was trying to guard тАФ not
exploding, no, but in a state of having already exploded.The white pillar. Blazing light blinding. Blind .