"Bud Sparhawk - Alba Krystal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sparhawk Bud)

At that point I stopped watching, hit the engines and began to climb into a higher orbit; dropping back
from the exploding cloud of debris that had been the freighter as our own speed built up.

On the next pass around the planet we watched the last few pieces of the freighter burn an intense green
as the friction of Grimm's atmosphere finished the job we'd started. James laid his hand on my shoulder
and squeezed.

There was no feeling of victory, no exultation. Alba was dead in the hulled station and we had just
balanced the score for her was all. The deep sadness we felt overbalanced the revenge by too much. I
felt drained.

The station was operable by the time we returned. There was an emergency seal over the lock and a
breathable, if underpressured, atmosphere restored. Three were repairing Alice's scarred face panels and
bringing her back to operating levels and Jerome was cleaning a mess off the floor. With an ugly shock I
realized it was part of a scorched leg -- Alba's.

"Where's Doc?" shouted James. Jock pointed a test probe toward the medical bay.

Doc was standing over the rejuvenation unit, staring at the ugly mass of black and red beneath the glass
lid. I noticed that all of the controls were in the green; fluids being pumped in, analyzer running, the
probes building up a picture of the task at hand.
"They put a bomb in the lock," Doc mumbled. "It was a bidirectional job and melted both lock doors at
the same time." he paused. "Alba must have been standing right in line with it and got hit by the blast."

Jerome motioned us outside, away from Doc. "It's pretty useless," he said. "Doc insisted that we try the
rejuvenation route but I think its hopeless. She must've had a good five minutes in vacuum before we
reached her. And there wasn't enough of her left to be alive before that. The blast tore her up something
awful. Hell," he spat, "half the torso was gone, along with the left arm and leg. Her face . . .."

James stopped him with a motion of his hand. Spare us the details the sign said. I agreed.

Two days later we'd gotten over the less damaging effects of the sudden decompression we'd undergone
in entering the hulled station. Everyone had been so busy getting the place back together we'd not even
noticed the bleeding noses, or gills in my case. Lord knows how we managed to ignore the pain of the
bends.

Alice's memory told us that her cursory exam verified the voucher from the freighter as valid and had
taken the loadmaster's ident. His picture was there, on the tape. How was she to know? A computer
couldn't recognize Alba's uncle unless we told her to. But the rest of us instantly recognized the grim
visage of Lys Krystal from our newstapes. So that was who we'd killed far below us, the head of the AI
branch family.

Somehow word must have gotten back to him that Alba was alive and at our station. How? Had the
lizards spoken of our guest to another? Could she have had the misfortune of their voucher for the
delivery reaching the very man who wished her dead? Perhaps we'd never know. It didn't matter. Only
the ache of her loss mattered now.

While most of us used the tasks of repairing the station to occupy our minds while time healed our
wounds and shock. Doc hung over the rejuvenation coffin and monitored the flickering of the instruments