"Jacquelyn Hooper - Home On The Range" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hooper Jacquelyn)

Paladin looked up from where he had set down their weapons for maintenance. "It
didn't have a magnet."

"Maybe she was the magnet." The weapons sat in a row on a tarp. Rae walked over
to them, and began examining the rifle. "Maybe she was one of those things Ev's
always nagging about on the radio, those things that killed Harris and Teagarden
--"

"Gremlins."

"Yeah." She raised the rifle, aimed it at a tree heavy with apples, and fired.
Three apples exploded, raining pulp sized pieces to the ground. "But Havenport
says this was a woman with fur."

"It don't matter what it was. It's dead." Paladin took his rifle, and handed her
a shotgun.

"It could've been Melinda Cordisian," Rae said. She began to strip the gun.
"Settlers reported her missing two days ago. Ev thinks she got Convert's
Disease."

Chris had heard of Melinda Cordisian. She had been a scientist on the first
strike team that landed on Cynataka. Paladin had known her from his army days on
Earth. She was matter of fact, he'd said. A woman who knew her place in the
world, not like most of them nowadays.

He wondered how she could have come down with Convert's Disease. It was said to
hit colonists, mostly. People who went beyond the protection of New river into
the uncontrolled regions of the planet. They breathed the unpurified air, tasted
the untreated water, ate food they had grown in the alien soil. Not soon after,
they became natives.

Melinda Cordisian had been among the first to discover the disease, and the
natives, when the planet was first maintained by the military, so she was not
stupid. But, like the others with Convert's, she made exterminating all the
harder. Things were bad enough without having to hunt your own kind as well as
the enemy.

"You've been personalizing the weaponry again," Rae said, staring at the pieces
of the shotgun. She picked up the barrel, looked through it. "What the hell is
in here?"

Paladin snatched it from her hands. "Clean the rest."
"That's New river equipment." She snapped a picture of it with her camera.
"You've just bought that antique. Comes out of your pay."

"Fine." He gave her another barrel. "And prime it right, this time. Damn near
tore my shoulder out in the recoil."

"Serves you right for using this old crap."