"Steve Perry - Aliens 03 - The Female War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

He looked back at the vid screen, where a patient with dark circles beneath her eyes was frozen in
mid-sentence. Nice dream, but that's all it seemed to be. He'd drifted since his first contact with the
monsters, lost a big chunk of time, until he'd rediscovered Billie in that psych ward, and a new purpose
along with her: to destroy the aliens who had fucked up himтАФand mankindтАФroyally. That was his goal,
but he was a practical man.

To Ripley, he said, "What makes you so sure about this?"

She shook her head. "I'm not sure, at least not in any way you could lay out and measure with a
rule or a scale."

"But you believe all this psych stuff means what you said? There's some kind of supermom alien
somewhere who could draw these bastards like shit does flies?"

"That's what I believe, yeah."

Wilks stared at the screen. Billie had been able to tell about the aliens on the ship he and Bueller
and she had stolen, that was a fact. And he'd had his own hunches, ducked when there wasn't any reason
to do it, and saved his ass because of it He wasn't much on religion or psyche stuff, but you didn't have to
be a chemical engineer to start a fire, either. Pragmatic was the way to go, to hell with the theoretical
crap. If Billie could dream the truth, maybe other people could do it too. Made sense.

"Okay. Let's suppose this scenario works," he said. "It's worth checking out a little more. If it's
right, it gives us a big hammer we can use against the suckers. I'm willing to play along and see where it
goes. I'll go talk to my friend."

"I'll go with you, if that's okay," said Ripley. "Billie? If you could dig through these files, pull out
names of military personnelтАФ"

Billie plucked the metal info sphere out of the reader and put it in her pocket.

Ripley grinned. "Fine. Why don't we meet this evening and see what we've got?"



Billie walked toward her quarters quickly. It was good to be in action, better to know that she
shared her dreams with others, that she wasn't alone. Ripley was a strong woman, a leader.

She turned a corner and almost ran into a robotech adjusting a light panel. Billie stopped short and
stood there, studying the design. It was simple machinery, made for only a few manual tasks; vaguely
humanoid, about two meters tall. Basically a control box with arms and legs.

Not like an android that you could mistake for human ...

Billie was suddenly very near tears. Mitch. She wondered what had become of him, her android
lover. As always, a mix of confused emotions came with the thought: anger, that he hadn't told her the
truth; worry, sadness. The pity she had felt when he'd been "repaired" on Spears's planetoid, his lovely
torso strapped to ugly metal legsтАФ like the limbs of the robot moving past her. When the final realization
had hit, it had been too late; she and Wilks were in space, headed away from the battle on the planetoid