"Robert Onopa - Republic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Onopa Robert)

hijacked the cab. We had it in mind to forcibly extract them but we had to leave when we realized that
weapons had been pilfered along with the cab and that they were being trained on The Copernicus.
****
We set course for home.

Adamowski had been right all along. Downplanet crew started turning up sick immediately. Adamowski
guessed disease was wiping out the aliens, too. Even before we left parking orbit, the great elder was
dead, though with the sled's weapons and the deserted marines for a time his group must have ruled the
planet.

We saw the evidence that the marines and weapons had been a tipping point on our way out of the
system; in the year it took us, we could see a transformation in the pattern of settlements, a consolidation,
then what might have been a collapse.

Most of the crew died in that year before reinsertion.

If our journey out seems a dream, our journey back, those years on The Copernicus, seem dark sleep
itself, dreamless sleep, the black night of cryo and faint stars as we crawled through the wormhole.

Adamowski died tending to the sick. That's why there are only eighteen of us left, that's why there are so
few survivors listed on the manifest.
****
It was a pleasure to talk with you yesterday. You're breaking up today as well. Of course it's a shame to
have come so close, only to be made so certain that we could never land. You will forgive my attack of
nostalgia--nostos, from the Greek, for home; algia, also from the Greek, for pain. Pain for home. We
understand that there's no choice but for you to apply a strict quarantine. We understand the potential for
severe measures if we approach. You will appreciate the irony. We came back willing to make do with
what might be left, and we were worried that it might not be safe to land. Now that Earth is restored, a
garden where there had been a smoldering wasteland, Earth has become the very place we can never
land. Once we thought we were the lucky ones.

When we signed on with The Copernicus, we thought the trip would be the adventure of our lives. Now
we know the trip was our lives.

Is our lives.

That's why the eighteen of us are turning The Copernicus back.

We've reinstalled and updated the original program. We still have plenty of reactor time to power the
drive. We want to see those pink clouds again. We want to die off the ship. We're curious about what
happened to Vrask and the six other marines. They didn't get sick, as maybe you've realized, because
they're the ones who went through the alien initiation, they're the ones who drank the blood.

Have you also asked yourself why the eighteen of us survived? Why if all the other members of the crew
died of disease, why we're still alive? I'm guessing that you have.

Yes, to be perfectly frank, yes, all eighteen of us drank the blood as well. I apologize for not telling you in
the first place. We brought alien blood to our lips just after Grace had been killed. The communion
transformed us. When we were forced to go back for the water, when the fighting started, when the rods
began humming and they pulled the white knives from their sheathes, we could kill with an energy and