"Anderson, Poul - 1964 Nicholas Van Rijn 02 - Trader to the Stars 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

at her glowing cigarette end for a moment, until a degree
of composure returned, and with it a touch of humor. "I
may pass for a fast, sophisticated girl on Freya, Captain.
But you know even better than I, Freya is a jerkwater
planet on the very fringe of human civilization. We've
hardly any spatial traffic, except the League merchant ship
and they never stay long in port. I really know nothing
about military or political technology. No one told me this
was anything more important than a scouting mission,
because I never thought to inquire. Why should the Ad-
derkops be so anxious to catch us?"
Torrance considered the total picture before framing a
reply. As a spaceman of the League, he must make an
effort before he could appreciate how little the enemy
actually meant to colonists who seldom left their home
world. The name "Adderkop" was Freyan, a tenn of
scorn for outlaws who'd been booted off the planet a
century ago. Since then, however, the Freyans had had
no direct contact with them. Somewhere in the unex-
plored deeps beyond Valhalla, the fugitives had settled on
some unknown planet. Over the generations, their num-
bers grew, and so did the numbers of their warships. But
Freya was still too strong for them to raid, and had no
extraplanetary enterprises of her own to be harried. Why
should Freya care?
Torrance decided to explain systematically, even if he
must repeat the obvious. "Well," he said, "the.-Adderkops
aren't stupid. They keep somewhat in touch with events,
and know the Polesotechnic League wants to expand its
operations into this region. They don't like that. It'd
mean the end of their attacks on planets which can't
fight back, their squeezing of tribute and their over-
priced trade. Not that the League is composed of sain1s;
we don't tolerate that sort of thing, but merely because
freebooting cuts into the profits of our member companies.
So the Adderkops undertook, not to fight a full-dress war
against us, but to harass our outposts till we gave it up as
a bad job. They have the advantage of knowing their own
sector of space, which we hardly do at all. And we were,
indeed, at the point of writing this whole region off and
trying someplace else. Freeman Van Rijn wanted to
make one last attempt. The opposition to doing so
was so great that he had to come here and lead the expedi-
tion himself.
"I suppose you know what he did. Used an unholy skill
at bribery and bluff, at extracting what little infonnation
the prisoners we'd taken possessed, at fitting odd facts
together. He got a clue to a hitherto untried segment. We
flitted there, picked up a neutrino trail, and followed it to
a human-colonized planet. As you know, it's almost cer-