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

A telescoping arm grabbed my neck, hard fingers choking me. Nothing snapped, although
as I was towed weightless out of the room, two ribs cracked under the impact of Ricardo's
ammunition.
I never even whimpered.

* * *

I lay naked on a deck, metal cold against my back. I was in the vehicle bay of Abraxas . It
had been completely stripped of equipment, from the shuttles down to our suit racks.
Gravity had been restored along with the lighting. Every exit was covered with pink foam.
My chest hurt like hell, a whopping bruise on one breast from Ricardo's rubber balls to go
along with the cracked ribs. I wondered if I was the only survivor of our crew. Was there
some way for me to kill myself here?

One of armored aliens lurched across the bay toward me. I tried to ignore it as I gently
explored my cracked ribs. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see it was almost three
meters tall, bipedal, with two thick armored arms and two more utility arms -- the extensors.
It didn't have a head, just prominent bumps on the shoulders.
It stood there, patient, quiet. A killer machine. The silence eventually got my attention, so I
stopped ignoring the alien and looked toward it, focusing on the black panels on the bumps.

"Incurse domains racekind you," the alien said.

We didn't even know what the aliens called themselves. Humans hadn't intercepted enough
telemetry to crack their language. The aliens had never invested time in talking to us. The
few times humans had captured an alien, it promptly died within the slagged interior of its
armor. No human prisoner had ever escaped or been returned.

A cheerful thought given my current circumstances.
"I don't know." I couldn't keep the whine out of my voice. "I don't understand 'incurse
domains.' I don't even think 'incurse' is a word."
The alien clucked at me for a moment, a giant mechanical chicken. "Formate this incursion
regular."

I propped myself up on my elbows. "'Formate this incursion regular.' That almost made
sense." I started to laugh, falling back onto the deck. "Where did you learn English? You
think 'incurse' is the regular verb form of 'incursion.'"
Laughter took me, uncontrollable, bringing shrieking pain to my ribs. I couldn't cry for
Abraxas and her crew but I could laugh until I threw up. After a while the alien left me to my
whooping misery.

* * *

Later my alien brought me food. The supplies were obviously looted from Abraxas ' galley
stores. Four vacuum-sealed bags of cornmeal at five kilos each, a three-liter tube of
brine-packed olives and a hundred-gram tube of cinnamon. The ridiculous menu confirmed
the aliens didn't normally keep human prisoners.

Maybe I wasn't slated to die. Starve perhaps, but not be executed. Hope springs eternal.
"Thanks," I said as I tugged at the olive tube. I didn't have a cap-puller, but figured I could