"William M. Gear - A Relic of the Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gear W Michael)
"Pretty soon a ship came in. We waited till it was too deep in the system's gravity well to jump back into hyperspace. Then we matched courses. Naturally they surrendered right away. We went in in suits so they couldn't describe us even if they could tell humans apart. Would you believe they had six hundred million stars in currency?"
"That's pretty good pay. What went wrong?"
"My idiot crew wouldn't leave. We'd figured most of the ships coming into the puppeteer system would be carrying money. They're misers, you know. Part of being a coward is wanting security. And they do most of their mining and manufacturing on other worlds, where they can get labor. So we waited for two more ships, because we had room for lots more money. The puppeteers wouldn't dare attack us inside their own system." Captain Kidd made a sound of disgust. "I can't really blame the men. In a sense they were right. One ship with a fusion drive can do a hell of a lot of damage just by hovering over a city. So we stayed.
"Meanwhile the puppeteers registered a formal complaint with Earth.
"Earth hates people who foul up interstellar trade. We'd offered physical harm to a puppeteer. A thing like that could cause a stock-market crash. So Earth offered the services of every police force in human space. Hardly seems fair, does it?"
"They ganged up on you. But they still couldn't come after you, could they? The puppeteers would have to tell the police how to find their system. They'd hardly do that; not when some human descendant might attack them a thousand years from now."
The Jinxian dialed himself a frozen daiquiri. "They had to wait till we left. I still don't know how they tracked us. Maybe they've got something that can track a gravity warp moving faster than light. I wouldn't put it past them to build it just for us, Anyway, 'when we angled toward
Jinx, we heard them telling the police of We Made It just where we were."
"Ouch."
"We headed for the nearest double star. Not my Idea; Hermie Preston's. He thought we could hide in the dust clouds in the trojan points. Whatever the puppeteers were using probably couldn't find us in normal space." Two thirsty gulps had finished his daiquiri. He crumpled the cup, watched it evaporate, dialed another. "The nearest double star was Mira Ceti. We hardly expected to find a planet in the trailing trojan point, but as long as it was there, we decided to use it."
"And here you are."
"You'll be better off when you've found a way to hide that ship."
"We had to find out about you first, Rich Mann. Tomorrow we'll sink the Puppet Master in the ocean. Already we've- shut off the fusion drive. The lifters work by battery, and the cops can't detect that."
"Fine. Now for the billion-dollar-"
"No, no, Rich Mann. I will not tell you where to find the puppeteer planet. Give up the whole idea. Shall we join the campfire group?"
Mann came joltingly alert. How had the stage trees lasted this long? Thinking fast, he said, "Is your autokitchen as good as mine?"
"Probably not. Why?"
"Let me treat your group to dinner, Captain Kidd."
Captain Kidd shook his head, smiling. "No offense, Rich Mann, but I can't read your kitchen controls, and there's no point in tempting you. You might rashly put someth-"
WHAM!
The living bubble bulged inward, snapped back. Captain Kidd swore and ran for the airlock. Mann stayed seated, motionless, hoping against hope that the Jinxian had forgotten him.
WHAM! WHAM! Flares of light from the region of the campfire. Captain Kidd frantically punched the cycle but-
ton, and the opaque inner door closed on him. Mann came to his feet, running.
both ways.
WHAM!
Mann searched through the airlock locker, pushing sections of spacesuit aside to find the lift belt. It wasn't there. He'd been wearing it; they'd taken it off him after they shot him down.
He moaned: a tormented, uncouth sound to come from a cultured Wunderlander. He had to have a lift belt.
WHAM WHAM WHAM. Someone was screaming far away.
Mann snatched up the suit's chest-and-shoulder section and locked it around him. It was rigid vacuum armor, with a lift motor built into the back. He took an extra moment to screw down the helmet, then hit the cycle button.
No use searching for weapons. They'd have taken even a variable-knife.
The Jinxian could be just outside waiting. He might have realized the truth by now.
The door opened.... Captain Kidd was easy to find, a running misshapen shadow and a frantic booming voice.
"Flatten out, you yeastheads! It's an attack!" He hadn't guessed. But he must know that the We Made It police would use stunners.
Mann twisted his lift control to full power.
The surge of pressure took him under the armpits. Two standard gem sent blood rushing to his feet, pushed him upward with four times Wunderland's gravity. A last stage log exploded under him, rocked him back and forth, and then all was dark and quiet.
He adjusted the attitude setthig to slant him almost straight forward. The dark ground sped beneath him. He moved northeast. Nobody was following him-yet.
Captain Kidd's men would have been killed, hurt, or at least stunned when the campfire exploded in their faces. He'd expected Captain Kidd to chase him, but the Jinxian couldn't have caught him. Lift motors are all alike, and Mann wasn't as heavy as the Jinxian.
He flew northeast, flying very low, knowing that the only landmarks big enough to smash him were the spires to the west. When be could no longer see the ships' lights, he turned south, still very low. Still nobody followed him. He was glad he'd taken the helmet; it protected his eyes from the wind.
In the blue dawn he came awake. The sky was darker than navy blue, and the light around him was dim, like blue moonlight, Little Mira was a hurtingly bright pinpoint between twp mountain peaks, bright enough to sear holes in a man's retinae. Mann unscrewed his helmet, adjusted the pink goggles over his eyes. Now it was even darker.
He poked his nose above the yellow moss. The plain and sky were empty of men. The pirates must be out looking for him, but they hadn't gotten here yet. So far so good.
Far out across the plain there was fire. A stage tree rose rapidly into the black sky, minus its roots and flowers, the wooden flanges at its base holding it in precarious aerodynamic stability. A white rope of smoke followed it up. When the smoke cut off, the tree became invisible until, much higher, there was a puff of white cloud like a flak burst. Now the seeds would be spreading across the sky.
Richard Mann smiled. Wonderful, how the stage trees had adapted to the loss of their masters. The Slavers had raised them on wide plantations, using the solid-fuel rocket cores inside the living bark to lift their ships from places where a fusion drive would have done damage. But the trees used the rockets for reproduction, to scatter their seeds farther than any plant before them.
An, well ... Richard Mann snuggled deeper into the yellow woolly stuff around him and began to consider his next move. He was a hero now in the eyes of humanity-at-large. He had badly damaged the pirate crew. When the police landed, he could count on a reward from the puppeteers. Should he settle for that or go on to bigger stakes?
The Puppet Master's cargo was bigger stakes, certainly. But even if he could take it, which seemed unlikely, how could he fit it into his ship? How escape the police of We Made It?
No. Mann had another stake in mind, one just as valuable and infinitely easier to hide.
What Captain Kidd apparently hadn't realized was that blackmail is not immoral to a puppeteer. There are well established rules of conduct that make blackmail perfectly safe both for blackmailer and victim. Two are that the blackmailer must submit to having certain portions of his memory erased, and must turn over all evidence against the victim. Mann was prepared to do this if he could force Captain Kidd to tell him where to find the puppeteer system. But how?
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