"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 08 - Under Twin Suns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

remove them, however, had not seemed wise. She could be hurt, even damaged, too easily. Thus, as Satana split the
spaceways en route here, she had had time to consider the uniqueness of the rings.
(They were exotic and eye-catching, and they didn't hurt, and she had studied her mirrored image a number of
times, thinking of what it might be like to leave the rings in place. . . .)
As she entered Decontam, she was not greeted by anything so crude as a puddle of chemically treated
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water. As a matter of fact she stepped naked into a bare, tiled room. The floor was padded, since some people had
fainted, mostly from apprehension, and one of the fobbers had won a settlement. The gleaming wall tiles were of
course backed by lead shielding.
Once the door was closed, it secured itself. The room secured itself. Anyone entering this chamber was obliged to
remain for the requisite two minutes. Just stand around and think pleasant thoughts, was the usual advice to
first-timers.
Hellfire, who was no first-timer, knew that she would become less than comfortably warm. The radiation she'd be
getting had been proven harmless in lawsuit after lawsuit on station after space station, years ago. Most of the
two-min period was consumed in reverse radia-tion, for safety. Just to be sure, spacefarer. All here is benign and for
Your and Our Own Good, believe it!
She would depart free and healthy, free of any exotic microorganisms that might menace her and, more im-portantly
to them, the good citizens of Jorinne. They had a right to be protected from what tradition called The Cryton Strain.
And that would be that, except for some tingling and possibly a bit of nausea. (Only in .078% of decontami-nation
subjects, galaxy-wide. That was the figure pride-fully provided by whatever idiots went to all the trouble to collect and
compile such gratuitous statistics.)
Diarrhea, on the other hand, was just about a certain-ty. It was the one truly bad aspect of decontamination. Stool
formation and regularity were the products of benign microorganisms that lived within the body. Re-lentless,
undiscriminating Decontam slew them in their millions. So-as she emerged she would hear a whu-chungl and get a
shot in the arm from the vaccine "gun" mounted in the jamb of that pale green door. The shot would go to work
helping her body. It blocked diarrhea (in 97-point-something cases out of a hundred).
"La la la de da-ahh," she sang, hoisting an arm and
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lightly rubbing under it as if she was taking a shower. Might as well make the most of it, make it fun.
Maybe Trafalgar Cuw had actually managed to teach her that. He seemed to be having a good time even
when some-one was busily trying to kill or capture him.
A cool customer, that Cuw! A hero who pretended to be otherwise, to believe that heroes were either
acci-dents or idiots. Hellfire smiled.
She had tried it with him, on Satana, en route here from Knor where that bastard Corundum had sent
them. She'd been a lesbian all her life that counted, anyhow. She just didn't care for most men, and certainly
not sexually. (True, she didn't care for most women, ei-ther.) That had been no great inconvenience, though
it had made a pirate of her. She had made her sexual predilection clear to the captain who had signed her
on, and he had assured her that was fine. She had the impression that his preference was for more
luxuriously constructed women, anyhow. The problem was that after a few months in space, even Hellfire
had begun to look good to him. He tried to make her, and failed. A while later he tried harder. He tried
rape. So she killed him. After that she had chosen to keep the ship and live on independently, as an outlaw.
That meant piracy.
On Knor, though, or rather inside it, those furry shorties had enslaved them all. The drug Hellfire and the
others were meticulously fed, daily, made them accept sexual bondage and even think they liked it. In
Survival, the precariously balanced sole city of icy, dead Knor-inside a mountain-there were two kinds of
people. Men (make that ''men'') and slaves.
Hellfire, Janja, and Quindy weren't men. They had been sexual slaves.
She had been ordered, bound, ringed, ordered, strapped, beaten, ordered and otherwise brutalized, and
used. For over two months, until Trafalgar and Janja had busted them out. That was with the aid of
Cinna-bar, who (or rather which, since, all Jarps took the