"Steve Perry - Matador 7 - Brother Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

the house. Cooling duct or something, she figured.

She sat up and swung her bare legs over the side of the bed. She hadn't been able to sleep. Might as well
do something useful.

She slipped a robe on and padded down the hall to the gym. Saval had a good set-up, as complete as
many small public gyms. Even though he favored free weights over machines, he had, along with the
couple tons of flexsteel plates and bars, a full ROM unit, a state-of-the-art computer-controlled SSA LS-
21. Gym rats around the galaxy liked to joke that the initials for the Strength Success Associates
Corporation who made the machine really stood for "Suffer, stupid asshole." The unit could measure
tonus and nerve conduction close enough so that when programmed properly it would take a user
exactly as far as she could go, no more, no less. It wouldn't let you overextend yourself; on the other
hand, you couldn't slack your way past it.

The gym lights blinked on as Taz stepped inside. The far wall was mirrored, and she watched herself as
she slipped out of the robe and stood naked in front of the LS-21. She was in good shape, she knew.
Most mues of her kind were; it seemed a waste not to be, given the potential. HG engineering had given
her great-grandparents thicker and heavier bone structure, a slight advantage in tendon leverage, and
attachments, and more muscle-building hormones than standard humans, as well as a faster metabolism.
Great-grandfather and -mother had been designed for planets with a gee-and-a-half or better. Maybe the
desire to use her body hard was built into her gene structure, she didn't know, but she did muchly enjoy
working up a good sweat.

Saval was a bug about free weights, called them more "organic," but Taz preferred the machines. They
were less risky than the heavy bars, even with the safety fields. The machines wouldn't let you go past
your limits; the flexsteel didn't know what those limits were, didn't care.

The SSA stood there like a larger version of a child's girder construction set, a tall rectangle with cams,

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bearings, bars and handles that moved into place or pivoted out of the way depending on the exercises.
She stepped into the machine. "On," she said. "Ten percent warm-up. Squats."

The machine weighed and measured her with its bioelectronic sensors, calculated and computed its
results, and increased the field strength to respond to her movements at one-tenth of her capacity for the
exercise ordered.

The crossbar came down and rested across her shoulders. Felt like about twenty-two, twenty-three kilos.
That'd be about right; she could squat two-twenty, two-thirty for a triple. She took a couple of breaths
and began to squat, facing the mirror, watching her doppelganger flash nudely back at her. Gods, her
pubic hair was thick. Looked like some animal's furry black pelt down there. She grinned. At least there
wasn't any gray in it yet, like there was on her head. A few strands at the temples shined through the
blue-black. She had it pulled back in a low braid; she usually wore it tied or plaited short when she was
working, but she sometimes liked being able to let it hang to her shoulders on her own time. Saval had
more gray in his hair than she did, but then her da had gone gray before her ma.

-Two. Three. Four-