"Vonda N. McIntyre-Screwtop" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

craft's sickening swaying ceased. When the hatch opened and red light spilled in, faintly dissipating the
blackness, Kylis looked up with all the others, and, like all the others, blinked like a frightened animal.
The guards had no sympathy for cramped muscles or nausea. Their shouted commands faded like
faraway echoes through Kylis' abused hearing. She pushed herself up, using the wall as support. Her legs
and feet were asleep. They began regaining sensation, and she felt as if she were walking on tiny knives.
She hobbled out, but at the bottom of the gangway she, too, had stumbled. A guard's curse and the prod
of his club brought her to her feet in a fury, fists clenched, but she quelled her violent temper instantly.
The guard watched with a smile, waiting. But Kylis had been to Earth, where one of the few animals left
outside the game preserves and zoos was the possum. She had learned its lesson well.
Now she crouched on the bank and watched the new prisoners realize, as she had, that the end of the
trip did not end the terrible heat. Screwtop was almost on the equator of Redsun, and the heat and
humidity never lessened. Even the rain was lukewarm.
The guards prodded the captives into a compact group and turned hoses on them, spraying off filth
and sweat. Afterward the new people plodded through the mud to the processing dome. Kylis watched
each one pass through the doorway. She had never defined what she looked for when she watched the
new arrivals, but whatever it was, she did not find it today. Even more of them were terribly young, and
they all had the look of hopelessness that would make them nothing more than fresh meat, new bodies for
the work to use up. Screwtop would grind them down and throw them away. They would die of disease
or exhaustion or carelessness. Kylis did not see in one of them the spark of defiance that might get them
through their sentences intact in body or spirit. But sometimes the spark only came out later, exposed by
the real adversity of the work.
The hatch swung shut and the hovercraft's engines roared to full power. No one at all had been taken
on board for release on North Continent.
The boat quivered on its skirts and floated back down the ramp, through the entrance, Onto the glassy
gray surface of the water. The gate sparked shut. Kylis was vaguely disappointed, for the landing was no
different from any she had seen since she was brought to Screwtop herself. There was no way to get on
board the boat. The familiar admission still annoyed her. For a spaceport rat, admitting defeat to the
safeguards of an earthbound vehicle was humiliating. She could not even think of a way to get herself out
of Screwtop, much less herself and Gryf and Jason. She was afraid that if she did not find some chance
of escape, Jason might really try to flee through the swamp.
She ran her fingers through her short black hair and shook her head, flinging out the misty rain that
gathered in huge drops and slipped down her face and neck and back. The heat and the rain-- she hated
both.
In an hour or two the evening rain would fall in solid sheets, washing the mist away. But an hour after
that the faint infuriating droplets would begin again. They seemed never to fall, but to hang in the air and
collect on skin, on hair, beneath trees, inside shelters.
Kylis grabbed an overhanging plant and stripped off a few of its red-black fronds, flinging them to the
ground in anger.
She stood up, but suddenly crouched down in hiding again. Below, Miria walked up to the fence,
placed her hand against the palm lock, and waited, glancing over her shoulder as if making certain she
was alone. As the gate swung open and Miria, a prisoner, walked alone and free into the guards'
enclosure, Kylis felt her knees grow weak. Miria stopped at a dome, and the door opened for her. Kylis
thought she could see the Lizard in the dimness beyond.
Almost the only thing this could mean was that Miria was a spy. Kylis began to tremble in fear and
anger, fear of what Miria could tell the Lizard that would help him increase the pressure on Gryf, anger at
herself for trusting Miria. She had made another mistake in judgment like the one that had imprisoned her,
and this time the consequences could be much worse.
She sat in the mud and the rain trying to think, until she realized that Gryf would be off work in only a
few minutes. She did not even have time to wake Jason.
When Kylis turned her back on the guards' domes, Miria had not yet come out.