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

captives. Instead they were helping hold their crewmates, who struggled and shouted obscenities at
them.
Brian had about two seconds in which to act before he lost the element of surprise. He did the only
thing he could think of: kicked off hard against the ceiling and flew into their midst, turning over in flight so
he struck feet first, knocking Pierre back. Sharrol kicked at the other person holding her and twisted
away. More hands reached for her, but Brian grasped the door frame with his right hand and her hair
with his left and yanked her free. They tumbled into the main tubeway, kicked off clumsily from the
receding wall of the sacrifice chamber, and flew across the tube and through a portal into another one just
as the back of Sharrol's green uniform tunic burst into flame. The science crew were using the alien
masers.
Sharrol screamed and slapped out the flames, but the word she repeated over and over as they pulled
themselves behind a building and Brian dragged her away was, "Dave, Dave, Dave!"
Brian tried to think of some way to break him free as well, but it was sixteen against two and the
sixteen had the weapons. If he and Sharrol could make it back to the ship they could get their own guns,
but even then it would have been suicide. Their only real option was to get away and go warn Earth what
was out here.
It had always been a danger. Many people back home argued that people should never have exposed
themselves to it in the first place, that alien technology wasn't worth the risk of importing alien ideas as
well. Look what happened the last time an alien idea got loose, they'd said. Humanity was over two
thousand years eradicating it, at the cost of billions of lives. And the concepts affected society forever.
In fact that probably wasn't the last time. Brian always suspected that the Aztecs had uncovered
something that led them down their high-tech but bloody path; now he bet he could describe just what
they found. A cache of alien memory devices, at least one of them still functional enough to plant a seed
in a receptive mind.
That was the sad thing explorers had discovered in their examination of the myriad relics left behind:
Aliens died, but their ideas lived on. Often twisted and warped to fit human minds and human agendas,
but they spread like fire. It usually took a fanatic to promote them, but these particular aliens seemed to
have found a way to make a fanatic of anyone.
The tube Sharrol and Brian were in curved around, and they heard voices in front of them again. Brian
looked for a side-passage, found one between two buildings, and they ducked into the next tube over. It
veered away toward another one, and from there they crossed to another, and so on until they looped
back around to the living quarters.
Pierre was waiting for them. "You're not going any--" he said, just before the headset Brian threw
crushed his throat. The memory devices made decent boomerangs as well. Brian wondered if that's
where the Australians had learned the trick, from artifacts with dead batteries that were useless for their
original purpose. Fortunately, that idea had spread as well.
"Dave," Sharrol said again. "We have to rescue Dave."
"No time," Brian told her. Pierre was good at moving in zero-gee; he had no doubt outdistanced the
others on his way back to head them off, but they couldn't be far behind.
Brian pulled Sharrol through the airlock and into the ship. He couldn't figure out how to seal the station
doors, but he knew his ship. He killed the power to its door. It was designed to withstand five hundred
gees; nobody would be coming through it unless he let them.
"Into the tanks," he told Sharrol. She nodded and went down the passageway toward the crew
quarters. Brian headed for the bridge. This time there was no hesitation. He stripped off his clothes,
climbed into the tank, and said, "Flood it." The computer started the oxylene flow. When it reached his
nose he inhaled it greedily.
Status? he typed on the talker panel.
"Crew are not present," the computer replied.
 Not even Sharrol? Had her injury finally caught up with her?
There was another explanation. Airlock status? he typed, and sure enough, the computer reported,