"Elizabeth Lynn - The Sardonyx Net" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lynn Elizabeth A)

He'd be damned and pickled before he'd live like that. Fingering the medallion round his neck, he
wondered which of Liathera's regular customers had overheard his conversation with The Pharmacy's
agent. It might have been anybody with good ears, catching a word here, a code there, waiting until the
deal was set, then trotting off to sell the information to Tori Lamonica. He'd never know. He wondered
how much she'd paid for the information. Savagely, he hoped it had been a lot.

Now he had nothing: no money -- well, very damn little, just enough to survive -- no dorazine to sell,
not even the name of a contact in Sardonyx Sector. He blanked the vision screen to help himself think,
and sat in the navigator's chair. It creaked. Everything on _Zipper_ creaked or whined or rattled, except
the Drive. But she was _his_, his ship, his home, his ticket to the Hype. No one who was not a Hyper
could quite understand what it felt like to have your own ship. He'd picked her out of the Nexus yards,
with Russell O'Neill's help.... He wondered if, by some lucky chance, Russell might be working Sardonyx
Sector. Russell the Pirate; Russell the thief. Russell might know someone on Chabad.

But Russell did not run drugs. Indeed, the redhead had warned him sharply that if he was planning to
turn drug courier, he should stay well away from Sardonyx Sector.

"I won't argue morals," Russell had said. "But consider some facts -- the Yago Family owns the Net,
and the Net runs on dorazine. So, when you transport dorazine to Chabad, you can figure that most of it
is destined for the Net. But it's as illegal to transport dorazine to Sardonyx Sector as it is in any other
sector of the Federation, and if the Hype cops catch you with it anywhere in the sector, they'll try you
and convict you and toss you into prison, and from prison you'll go to the Net, where they'll shoot you full
of dorazine and turn you into a slave on Chabad, and serve you right. You want to run drugs, that's your
business, not mine. You make your own ethical choices. But you'd better get some more experience on
the circuits, Dana, before you try to run dorazine."

Dana grinned, remembering.... That conversation, like many others during the six months he'd been
pilot on the _Morgana_, had ended up in bed. He'd never made love with a man before, but he learned
soon enough that it was hard to say no to Russell. The loving had been fun. But he'd kept the lecture in
mind over the last eight months. For the first two of them, he had even looked for legal work. Russell,
had he heard of _that_, would have surely laughed. Finding nothing that sparked his interest, Dana had
turned to the drug trade. Gamblers' runs had seemed exciting, at first, but the excitement quickly palled.
And then, in Liathera's, the agent said, "You've got quite a reputation. Aren't you getting a bit tired of
gamblers' runs?"

Dana admitted that he was.

"You're young, tough. Maybe you'd like to pick up some bigger credits?"

"Sure."

"Want to work with The Pharmacy? You'd need some supply money -- nothing much, maybe eight
hundred credits -- and a contact in Sector Sardonyx. But you've got that, I'm sure."

"Sure," Dana said again.

He'd lied. He didn't know one single soul on Chabad. But the agent hadn't known he'd lied, and why
should he? With a cooler full of dorazine, Dana had figured, he'd find a dealer after two hours on
Chabad. The agent's instructions were simple. They liked two-courier runs in the dorazine trade. Dana,
as the second runner, would be responsible for making pickup and paying the transfer fee. He would then