"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

passenger liner customers. Liners dropped through planetside clouds and
weather, generators roaring on flux, using the occasional guidance jet, to
land featherlike on hardpads set among manicured lawns and exotic
plantings.

She had not been able, as yet, to notify her father of her coming. She
had decided, when one last attempt to call had been frustrated on Delos,
to surprise him. She gathered her bags, hailed a taxi, and gave the driver
an address a full thirty miles away, on the outskirts of Old Port.

"Sure you can afford this, Lieutenant?" the driver asked.

"Has there been inflation in the past six years?"

"Does a bear defecate in the woods?"

"If it's that bad, maybe you'd better give me an estimate," Erin said.

The driver let his eyes drift up and down her well-shaped body. His gaze
lingered on the ship's patch over her left breast. "Say, you're from the
Rimfire?"

"Yes."

"You with her all the way around?"
 He had a tattoo on his forearm that told Erin he was a veteran of X&A
Service. She talked Service talk to him. "Does a bear shit in the woods?"
she asked.

The driver laughed heartily. "As it happens, I live in Old Port and I was
just thinking about heading home when you got aboard. Tell you what,
Lieutenant, this one's on me."

She tossed her bags to the floorboard and took a seat. The hydrocar
leaped forward. "I was in the Service a few years back," the driver said.

"Yep," Erin said. "I noticed."

"Battle cruiser. Went out with the peace force that occupied Taratwo.
That was before your time."

"I'm afraid so," Erin said.

The driver was looking into the rearview mirror. He had read her name
tag, but it hadn't registered until he spelled it out backward from the
mirror. He said, "Kenner. Kenner. Say, you wouldn't be John Kenner's
girl?"

"I am," she said, smiling. "Do you know my father?"