"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 5 - Flinx in Flux" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

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him back to the Teacher, high in synchronous orbit.
Pip's wings ruffled his hair from behind. The flying snake was up and anxious.
"Now what?"
Then he was wrenching viciously on the crawler's control bar, the front treads
spitting sand to the left as he turned it sharply.
Chapter Three

The figure lying in front of the crawler was as motionless as the huge pieces of
driftwood the river cast up during the rainy season. Scrap continued to bump
anxiously against the front window as Flinx set the engine to idle. Pip rose
from her seat to settle on his shoulder.
He cracked the dome, letting the hot, humid air swirl around him for a moment
before climbing down to the beach. A narrow track such as a turtle might make
returning to the sea had been gouged in the sand. It led from the river's edge
to the prone figure's feet, showing the route the refugee had taken from water
to dry land. His eyes flicked over the slow‑moving stream. There was no sign of
a boat, nor did he expect to see one.
Reaching the body, he rolled it over on to its back and unexpectedly found
himself recalling the line "Diese ist kein Mann" from the ancient Wagnerian
tridee. She was no Brunhilde, however, and he was certainly no Siegfried.
Beneath the dirt, scratches, bruises, and millimite bug bites lay the battered
shell of a very attractive woman.
She was still alive. If she had not been, his mind would not have reacted as it
had. Her demise might have saved him a headache, but for the moment at least he
did not mind having endured the brief pain. Her pulse was weak but not
dangerously so‑clearly she was in the last stages of exhaustion. The trail
leading back to the river indicated she had made it this far on hands and belly.
She only looked dead.
What he could not fathom were the shorts and short sleeved shirt. Nice attire
for a sealed hotel, but potentially fatal anywhere else on Alaspin. Her arms and
legs were striped with millimite bug trails, and deep red splotches showed where
drill beetles had been mining. They were bad enough, but he could understand
them. The bruises were more cryptic. They did not look like the kind a drifting
log would make, and there were no rapids anywhere along this stretch of river.
Her blond hair was cut short on top, sides, and front save for a single tail
that trailed six centimeters from behind her right ear and ended in a soggy
knot. A star had been shaved above each ear. He did not recognize the style, but
then, style was not something he usually concerned himself with.
He felt her clothing. Thin, lightweight. Cool and utterly useless against
Alaspin's rapacious insect life. You wore either jungle drill or two sets of
something else. How the hell had she ended up here like this?
A dumb tourist determined to see the backcountry on her own, most likely. Tried
to walk or float out when her vehicle broke down instead of staying with it and
waiting for help. An infrequent bit of stupidity, but not unheard of. Birding or
snake watching or taking tridee chips.
Then he reminded himself she might have come upriver in an enclosed boat. If it