"Jerry Oltion - Artifacts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

Artifacts
by Jerry Oltion
This story copyright 1998 by Jerry Oltion. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


The worst part was the drowning. No matter how many times he did it, when the gee pod began to fill
with oxylene and Brian felt the warm, neutrally buoyant acceleration fluid lapping at his ears and then at
his cheeks and finally at his nose, he screamed loud enough to wake the passengers in cryo. But it only
echoed in his tiny sealed tank, and since his ears were already awash and gurgling he didn't hear it all that
well himself.
"Good," the comp said, as it always said. "One more, please. Empty your lungs completely." He could
hear that just fine, since it came in through the bone phone in his jaw.
He obliged it. No problem. By then the oxylene was up past his nostrils anyway, and there was only
one thing to do. If he held his breath he would just choke longer.
So he screamed all his air away, flattened his lungs as much as possible, and then while his mouth was
still open in that primal expression of terror... he breathed in.
Oxylene's density was the same as the human body, but it had the viscosity of starlight. The stuff slid
right down. Plus it was supercharged with oxygen, so it hit like jet fuel. Brian gasped a whole lungfull in
shock, blew most of it back out to splash against the curved wall of his tank, then sucked in another more
normal breath. It tasted a little metallic, like water stored in an aluminum pitcher, but after a few breaths
he hardly noticed it. The sound was worse. His pulse beat like a drum in his ears, and would until the
acceleration was over and he could get out of the tank.
"Are you comfortable?" the comp asked.
He pinched his nose and blew the last of the air out of his sinuses through the shunt installed in his ear.
He also belched and farted and blew bubbles out of a few other special orifices most people didn't have.
He couldn't leave air anywhere inside of him. At five hundred gees, a gas pocket the size of a ping-pong
ball could kill.
"Captain?"
His voice wouldn't work now that his throat was full of fluid, so he reached up through the warm
currents and tapped the talker panel in front of him. It was an easy arm's reach; his tank was less than a
meter in diameter. The panel had been above him a moment earlier. He hadn't moved, but up and down
ceased to mean anything once he was afloat. That was the whole point of the tanks. He pressed the
green "yes" button in the glowing panel and settled back for launch.
"Crew are secure," the comp told him. "Passengers are secure. Cargo is foamed." The passengers
didn't get gee pods. It was too expensive to do that for everyone, and too dangerous. Only the captain
and his crew of four stayed awake during the trip. People who weren't needed on the way were frozen
for transport, then sealed in dry ice bodymolds and slotted into cubbies. The cargo was just stacked and
sprayfoamed into place. The boxes weren't going anywhere, and it was the shipper's problem if the
internal packing didn't hold up to the thrust.
Brian pushed the "proceed" button on his panel, then lowered his arm to its rest. Theoretically it could
have hovered over his head during launch, the oxylene holding it perfectly balanced, but he wasn't that
trusting. A slight difference in density between the working fluid and his body, and his arm could suddenly
weigh half a ton. Of course if there was an imbalance he'd probably die from internal hemorrhaging
anyway, but he didn't want to slap himself in the face first.
"Launch in ten," the comp said. "Nine." And so on down to zero.