"R. Garcia Y Robertson - Oxygen Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robertson R Garcia Y)

hissed to Tammy, "Now's when we call in Leo's people."

"No, I don't think so," Tammy replied evenly. Derek turned in surprise, and saw that Tammy was holding
a gun on him, which dear sweet Mia would never have done. He could barely believe it, but a plastic
fire-and-forget stinger had somehow materialized in her hand. Derek opened his mouth to protest, but
before he could get a word out, Tammy shot him.

Thor's Hammer

Derek awoke in a sealed cubicle aboard ship, wearing a slave collar. His sleep grenade and hypo-rings
were gone. There was absolutely no lightтАФbut he didn't need xl-10,000 night vision zoom lenses to
know he was in a sealed box. His comlink had vanished, but he still had the pilot's navigation chip
embedded in his skull. Inertial sensors showed Derek was accelerating at about 20-gs, something you
could only do in a fast starship, like the Fornax Skylark he had seen hiding in the shaft. Simple logic said
that he was aboard that ship, headed rapidly outsystem. Pity he waited so late to resort to logic.

Fingering his slave collar, he found it was standard issue, fitted for tracking, paralysis, lie detection,
emotional motivation, and who knows what else? There were no ill effects from the stinger, so the
fire-and-forget hornet must have been set on SLEEP. Such a stinger could just as easily have killed him,
or put him in a coma. Tammy, it seemed, wanted him alive and consciousтАФfor the moment, at least. He
remembered how she had stared at him over the sights, not angry, or gleeful, just giving him that same
even look she shown him in Pender's bunker, when she first pulled her head out of the assault-cannon's
sighting hood. Greenies had warned him that Earthwomen were dangerous, but it took Tammy to
convince him.

He told his nav-chip to work out pursuit vectors, assuming all available vessels gave chase as soon as the
Skylark burst out of the silo. Results were not good. Greenies had nothing that could catch it, just a
couple of interstellar yachts converted to escorts that might do 10-gs at a stretch. Backing up the
Greenies was the armed merchant cruiser Eclipse, a naval vessel with the legs to run down the
SkylarkтАФbut not anytime soon. Eclipse had been nosing about upsun for signs of slavers or Humanist
hold-outs, while the Skylark was going like lightning in the opposite direction. Even if Eclipse dropped
everything to pursue, half of Tartarus system lay between them, which would mean a long stern chase into
the vastness of interstellar space.

Of course, no one might be chasing them at all. Whoever was running this ship were bound to be diehard
Humanists. Greenies and the Navy might figure that Harmonia system was far better off without such
fanatics, and any attempt at pursuit would smack too much of wanting them back. Leaving Derek an
unwilling passenger on a ship full of lunatic pariahs headed who knows where.

Presently, his door dilated and Tammy appeared, a smirk on her face, casually holding a slave-remote in
place of the stinger. "Sorry to put you through this," she told him, "but it couldn't be helped."

"Oh, really?" Derek could easily have avoided all this.

"Don't act so pure," Tammy snorted. "All the time you were romancing me, you were fucking a Greenie."

"You should try it sometime," Derek suggested. A good Greenie-fuck might be just what Tammy needed,
to help her loosen up a bit, and maybe get to know the neighbors.

"Come with me," she told him, motioning with the remote. "Or I will have you carried."