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

"Ventral lock open."
She had gone back for Dave.
Brian could have drained his tank and gone after her. Or he could have launched then. He did neither.
He gave her as much time as he could, but when he saw motion through the peep hole in his tank he
tapped the launch key.
"Crew is not secure," the computer said.
Damn it. Command override, he typed.
"Authorization sequence?" it asked.
A loud clang nearly deafened him. They were beating on his tank. If he survived this he vowed never
to tap on an aquarium to startle the fish again.
He typed the ten-digit code into the talker panel.
The oxylene just inside the porthole flashed into vapor. They were shooting their masers through the
hole.
Launch, he typed.
"Are you sure?" the computer asked. "Crew is not present, passengers are not secure, and we're still
docked to--"
He stabbed the button again. Launch. Launch, launch, launch.
The bomb went off. The walls of his tank flexed. Lights flickered. The bubbles in his oxylene, crushed
by the sudden acceleration, vanished as if by magic.
Abort, he typed. There was no need to add insult to devastation.
Drain tank.
When he stepped out, the floor was coated with red goo. He floated above it to the control panel,
flipped the ship end for end, and looked through the porthole at the Artifact. It was an expanding cloud
of debris, completely unrecognizable now. None of the tubes had survived. He didn't know about the
memory modules, but the one he had smashed earlier hadn't seemed strong enough to survive an
explosion of that magnitude.
Neither were Sharrol and Dave. Nor anyone else on board, not even the passengers still suspended in
cryo. Brian felt a lump in his throat and he waited for it to expand and choke off his air, but it didn't,
quite.
He thought about Pierre, so callous about other people's lives since their last trip out there. He must
have been indoctrinated then, and been part of the plot to spread the alien religion back to Earth. Had he
smuggled any of the alien memory devices home yet? Probably not. Getting them past the tech police
would have been nearly impossible without help. He would have used their last layover on Rockaway
Station to set up a smuggling operation, which he no doubt intended to set into motion this time.
Well, I certainly put a stop to that, Brian thought as he watched the debris from the Artifact spread out
into space. He would have liked to think he had no other option, but he wondered. Sharrol had rushed
back into danger to save her lover; he had chosen the easy way out, at the expense of sixteen people's
lives and another seven who never got out of cryo. He had done it without malice, but without remorse as
well.
Julie had hit him with one of those damned memory devices the moment he got on board the station.
She'd had to have a reason for it. Maybe she'd just been softening him up for the full indoctrination later,
or maybe that had been it right there, her memory of nude skydiving just a smoke screen to hide what she
was doing to his subconscious mind at the same time. Robbing his respect for life and instilling loyalty to a
higher power.
If so then she'd been hoist by her own petard. Brian actually chuckled when he thought that. And then
he knew. Damn, damn, damn.
He hadn't stopped it. Not yet. There was still one infected person left, and as anyone who'd dealt with
religion knew, once the concepts were in your brain they were nearly impossible to get out. They slipped
through in your behavior, in your word choices, in your secret fears and desires, affecting you and the
people around you for the rest of your life.