"Rampart World - 02 - Orion Arm" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)
He feels the blood rush to his face. Not trusting himself to speak, he stands rigid, fists clenched at his sides. The Galapharma security chief takes a step toward him. But almost at once the abrupt surge of rage and panic dissipates.
"You'll have her vote."
Drummond nods. He lifts an oddly shaped bottle containing a milky mauve concoction, uncorks it and sniffs the contents. "Ever tried this stuff? Gemmulan absinthe. Females of the Y'tata race use it to enhance labial dexterity. It's supposed to do interesting things to the male human anatomy, too."
He manages to say, "Is there anything else we should discuss? If not, I should be going."
"You'll be contacted when it's time for us to meet again."
"Not here," he declares adamantly.
"Killjoy." Alistair Drummond laughs, turning his back dis-missively upon his guest. "Baldwin, did you see any Y'tata analogues on deck when you were waiting in the green room?"
The guest doesn't wait to hear the security chief's reply. Slipping out of the box, he closes the door and almost races up the aisle to the exit.
The three lubricious usherettes sneer as they retrieve his outerwear and weapons from the cloakroom, but he takes petty revenge by slapping down a measly fiver for a tip before lurching outside into the rowdy commotion of the Strip. The rain has stopped and dawn is breaking. The rose and gold radiance of the summer morning sky overwhelms the tawdry artificial lighting of the clip-joints. They seem dingy, shrunken, and unutterably sad.
But his ordeal is over.
Except for the matter of Katje.
Realizing what he might yet have to do, he staggers through the mob of diehard revelers and vomits into the gutter. No one notices. After a few minutes he recovers and heads back to his hopper, while the carnival music plays on and the human Gwaliorite screams in its silver-draped show window.
Chapter 1
I'd been home for three days, and it still didn't feel like home.
Trouble was, I was depressed. Not just about bailing out of the Rampart mess, but about the resolute way that Matilde Gregoire had spoken to me after I'd quit, saying we were through. There was no place in her life for a Throwaway charterboat skipper . .. and evidently no place in mine for a dedicated Starcorp loyalist.
Half dressed and barefoot, I stared into the open refrigerator, wondering what I was going to eat for breakfast. I'd had my heart set on a monster Tabasco scramble, but all the eggs were gone. There were no green peppers, either. I still hadn't done a real grocery buy since my return, and the garden had been destroyed in the sea toad attack.
Just as an interesting alternative popped into my mind, the phone buzzed. I went out of the kitchen onto the field-screened front porch of my beach shack, which serves as the office and scuba equipment sales area.
"Cap'n Belly's Dive Charters."
The caller was female and apologetic. "This is Jenny Chung, Captain. My husband and I were supposed to go out with you today, but I'm afraid we'll have to cancel. The weather is just awful here at the Big Beach. We checked the report for the Out Islands andЧ"
"The tropical depression isn't due to arrive in this area until late tonight," I said pleasantly. "We're expecting a sunny, calm day in the place I'd picked for our dive."
"We really don't want to risk it. And we're returning home to Plusia-Prime tonight, so we won't be able to reschedule the trip. I'm very sorry. Of course, you may keep our depositЧ"
The Chung couple would have been my first clients since my return from the planet Seriphos, and I'd been looking forward to the trip as an affirmation of my reacquired independence: I was free of Rampart responsibilities, free of my father's convoluted intrigues, freeЧalas!Чof my emotional relationship with a lovely woman who disapproved of my undisciplined and feckless ways.
Well, the choices had been my own.
I picked up a mesh catch bag and went down the porch steps onto the beach in search of marine edibles. The morning sun was still behind the island so the sand was cool, shaded by the grove of mint palms that crowd close to my house on three sides. Eyebrow Cay's lagoon was mirror-smooth, reflecting a blue sky adorned with a few puffy cumulus clouds and countless silvery paintbrush strokes of the comets that infest Kedge-Lockaby's solar system. Glasha Romanov's classic fishing smack trolled the calm waters out near the reef. A nifty motor-sailer based at Manukura came slowly around Cheddar Head, outward bound with a party of tourists after spending the night moored at Gumercindo Huckle-bury's marina. (I know: impossible name. But almost everybody on Eyebrow uses an alias. Mine is Helmut Icicle.) The big sailboat would probably ride out the upcoming storm in the shelter of Alibi Island, our larger neighbor to the west, after sending its clients back to the Big Beach on the hop-shuttle.
Eyebrow Cay is a crescent, as its name indicates, about twenty-five kilometers from end to end. The jagged reef, with only two safe passages, extends from each tip of the island, completing a lopsided circle and enclosing our lagoon. Almost all of Eyebrow's population, under fifty souls, live on the inner shore where there are attractive sand beaches. The island's largest natural harbor holds the marina and Sal Faustino's boatyard, a few guest houses, a kite shop, and our little general store.
Many of the folks on Eyebrow Cay are Throwaways, and quite a few others have personal histories that don't bear close scrutiny. I definitely fit into the latter category; and if Rampart's personnel office was on the ball in upgrading their database, I would already have rejoined the former group after a brief sojourn among the franchised citizenry of the Commonwealth.
Two friends share the cove where I live. To the south, half visible through the palm grove, is the deceptively modest bungalow of Mimo Bermudez, who may be the wealthiest man on Kedge-Lockaby. He is certainly one of the most enigmatic. My neighbor on the other side is Kofi Rutherford, another dive charter skipper, whose tumbledown dump lies out of sight behind a small rocky rise.
Both men had come to the rescue when my previous home had been gobbled by a giant sea toad, six months earlier. Mimo had shot the monster dead and Kofi helped search its stinking guts for salvageable household items . .. among other things. Not much of my stuff had escaped the brute's invincible digestive juices. But with help from Mimo and Kofi and other good buddies on Eyebrow, I'd ended up with a new little house even better than the old one. It still wasn't quite finished.
There are about four hundred Out Islands strung in a loose archipelago a couple of thousand kilometers west of the Big Beach, Kedge-Lockaby's single continent. Manukura, our planetary capital, boasts a tiny starport, the best hotels, a clutch of boutiques and craftshops, the independent casino that supports K-L's schools, and the rest of what passes for Kedgeree civilization. Most permanent residents live on the BB, and most Perseus Spur tourists go no farther abroad in search of recreation. The islands are much more primitive, more gorgeous, and utterly lawless. This has advantages and disadvantages, as I had already discovered and was shortly to reaffirm.
But first, breakfast!
I rolled up my jeans and splashed around the shallows, grabbed a dozen yolkworms before they could burrow out of reach, and stuffed them in my bag. They're repulsive-looking greenish squirmers about twenty centimeters long with a fringe of tiny paddles along each body segment. The edible part is a yellow sperm sac the size of a small plum, which cooks up better than the yolk of a fresh-laid chicken egg.
I cleaned the catch and tossed the leftovers to an eager flock of elvis-birds that glided down out of the mint palms, humming melodiously. Slogging back to the kitchen, I thought about how to spend the rest of the day before the storm hit.
I could paint window frames. (Yuck.) I could design a spiffier brochure to entice more sport divers from Big Beach hotels. (Double yuck.) I could start another vegetable garden, since the last one had been totaled by corrosive slobber from the shack-eating toad. (Exponential yuck, and besides, the impending storm would mess up the new plantings.) There were other chores, too, but the prospect had absolutely no appeal.
Ah, to hell with doing anything useful. I'd spent the last three days unpacking the stuff I'd brought back from Seriphos, evicting the vermin who'd snuck into the house during my long absence, and testing some new diving gear. Why shouldn't I goof off now and visit the Glory Hole? It's my second favorite place in all the galaxy, numero uno being the Sky Ranch in Arizona, where I was born.
(But I hadn't been there for thirteen years. Not since I had announced, fresh out of law school, that I was joining the Corporate Fraud Department of the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat rather than coming into Rampart Starcorp, as my father had expected.. .)
I whipped up the scramble and served it on soda biscuits, garnished with locally smoked faux lox. Then I called Kofi Rutherford to ask if he'd be my dive buddy. He wasn't answering his phone, but I figured maybe I could catch him over at the marina. I began to pack a lunch for two, and while I was building sandwiches the phone in my pocket buzzed again.
"Helly, it's Mimo," said a suave, familiar voice. "You have a subspace call. From Earth. Your sister, Eve."
"I'm on my way," I said, hitting the End pad and loping out the kitchen door. My phone was a cheap model without video, much less a patch option, so there was no way I could have the call transferred.
The only private SS com on our little freesoil planet was just where you'd expect it to beЧin the home of Guillermo Javier Bermudez Obregon, semiretired Smuggler King of the Perseus Spur and my closest friend on K-L. He's beyond middle-aged, extravagantly generous, and inclined to keep mum about his past and present affairs. For reasons that are not quite clear to me, I have told him far too much about my own sorry history.
I trotted along the path through the palms in my bare feet, dodging scissor-shells, sandtacks, and the sharp-pointed fallen fronds of the exotic trees, certain that Eve was about to deliver the melancholy news that Rampart's Board of Directors had approved the shotgun marriage of my family's Starcorp and Galapharma AC.
I'd figured it would happen. The expectation had been one of my main reasons for opting out.
Mimo was waiting for me behind his screen door, a tall and skinny figure dressed in a fawn pashmina dressing gown, beat-up huarache sandals, and nothing much else. His habitually uncombed gray hair was even more frowsy than usual, and his lean, deeply furrowed face wore a look of grave concern.
He said only, "This way," and led me down a hallway decorated with primitive santo paintings, Maria Martinez pottery, and illuminated wallboxes holding ancient Aztec figurines.
The room that served as his study and command center was finished in cream-colored adobe and had a beamed ceiling. The floor was patterned red Mexican tile, softened with striped throw rugs. A fireplace, ready for the impending rainy season, held split fingertree logs resting on heavy andirons. Cushioned wicker chairs and a sofa stood before it. Above the plank mantelpiece with its twin wrought-iron candlesticks hung the portrait of a dark-haired woman dressed in the fashion of thirty years agoЧmy friend's late wife. A huge Mexican desk of elaborately carved oak stood before a window that overlooked the sea. Along the left-hand wall were two antique bibliotecas crammed with data-dime files, reader-slates, e-books, and conventional volumes. Between them, gleaming in modern ceramalloy incongruity, hulked a tall gun cabinet that I knew held an awesome collection of photon beamers and other portable arms. The communications equipment occupied an alcove of its own, framed by exotic plants growing in black Oaxaca alias.
The old smuggler gestured for me to sit down at the transceiver console. "When you're finished, I'll give you coffee." He left the room.
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