"Carver, Jeffrey A - Parrone - The Dragons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carver Jeffrey A)

PARRONE: THE DRAGONS
by
Jeffrey A. Carver
PROLOGUE
"Now You all know-" the lanky ex-rigger paused to gulp from his
al@hhhh!-"just how dangerous star travel can be." He peered out across
the spaceport bar, studying the faces looking back at him-mostly young
star-riggers who thought they knew a lot more than they did. "You all
know that much, right?" he asked rhetorically. "Well, I'm tellin'
you, it's a lot more dangerous than you ever imagined.
Swear t'God!"
He burped and made a sweeping gesture with his mug.
He reeled a little from the movement. His unkempt hair fell across
his eyes, and he swept it back in annoyance. He had a story to tell,
and the audience was volatile. Mustn't keep them waiting.
"Y'see " "Just tell us the frickin' story, will you?" a fat man
complained, from across the room.
"I am tellin' ya, dammit! " he said with a glare. He ticked off on
his fingers the events that had occurred seven years ago this month.
"One! We flew into the mountain region, cocky as all hell,
thinking-there ain't nothing that can hurt us. We're two topflight,
cream-of-the-crop, stay-out-of-our way, kick-ass riggers! Right?
Besides, everyone knows there are no dragons really there." He
snorted at his own words.
He glanced up, and twitched as a rigger in the back of the bar, not a
human but some kind of horse-headed Swert, inhaled something from a
chrome cylinder and blew an enormous, billowing neon bubble into the
air above the barroom patrons.
He continued quickly, before anyone could get distracted. "Two!

It wasn't more'n ten minutes before a whole flight of dragons
appeared-and I don't mean some kinda cute lizards. I mean dragons.
Huge things! We tried to make contact with them. Friendly contact."
He barked out a bitter laugh, which seemed to have an odd effect on
his audience. Some looked cynical, others looked puzzled. At least he
was getting through to somebody.
A sword-wielding knight sprang up from the top of someone's head
about three tables back and stabbed a few times with its blade, before
winking out. The ex-rigger glared at the kid with the bolo, a
scrawny-looking, redhaired misfit who didn't even look old enough to be
at a bar. The kid snickered nervously.
"Three!" the rigger roared, trying to overcome the interruption.
"The bastards set on us like a pack of Alsepian blood wolves!"
"A real dogfight, eh?" someone called helpfully.
"It was a dogfight!" the rigger snapped. "Just like in prespace
times. Except there was just the two of us in our ship, and at least
four of them, flyin' around like crazy, blowing fire and smoke and
tryin' to knock us out of the sky! You wouldn't've known we were in
space, it looked so much like real mountains and sky. Never seen
anything so real in the Flux. We couldn't do a thing to change the