"Jay Lake - Eating Their Sins and Ours" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

Eating Their Sins and Ours
by Jay Lake




"Bitch," whispered Ricardo, jamming home the spring-feeder on the chamber of his
ballspitter.

Most of Abraxas ' systems -- power, gravity, helm -- had gone with the aliens' first salvo. At
least we still had atmosphere. I had been reviewing manifests on the big wallscreen in the
ready room when the attack began, the bridge vacant for the first critical seconds of
combat. That should have been all right, damn it. The aliens had never been seen within the
Solar System before -- troublesome as they were, they were considered a colonial
problem. Traffic control doctrine called for civilian ships like Abraxas to maintain a low-level
defense posture, in order to avoid messy accidents.
I held on to that thought, a bitter mantra against the blood-price our crew was paying. A
blood-price I had earned them through my casual negligence.

"Traitor." He rotated the locking collar on the gas cylinder.
Ricardo had tethered himself near one corner of the ready room to tinker with his ballspitter.
Hollow rubber bullets powered by compressed air -- one of the few usable weapons on a
starship, where high-velocity kinetics and energy weapons both had fatal drawbacks. Plus,
with practice you could shoot around corners.

"Murderess." He checked his sighting, aiming the ballspitter at my face.
Idiot was more like it, but Ricardo didn't seem to require a response. I just stared back,
willing him to shoot me, to shatter my forehead at two hundred meters per second. The
ballspitter would kill an unprotected human at short ranges -- messy, bruised death.
Too bad the aliens wore hardened vacuum armor. Rubber balls didn't do much to them.
They didn't find blowing holes in a human ship's hull a meaningful impediment either. Me, I
was armed with clenched fists and regret.

"You'll pay right along with the rest of us." Ricardo dropped his aim and went through his
weapon check all over again.
Eventually our emergency sticklights failed. Banging noises occasionally carried through
the bulkheads. A red grainbulb on the backup aircycler let me know I hadn't gone blind.
Ricardo's breathing thundered in the quiet dark, his ballspitter clicking as he worked through
the weapon check over and over and over.

When the ready room's hatch finally broke open, the noise was unbearable. In flooding
pulses of colored light, I saw Ricardo push off from his corner, ballspitter spewing like a
supercargo at the end of a three-day station leave. I tried to scramble out from behind the
galley processor, tried to swarm the alien's armored bulk with my fists, but I couldn't move. I
just couldn't make myself move.
One of the aliens telescoped an impossibly long arm through the spray of rubber bullets and
snapped Ricardo's neck. I recovered from my paralysis to curl into a fetal crouch as the
balls bounced around the ready room, working off their killing velocity in the spinning colored
lights.