"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 08 - Under Twin Suns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

Naked, Hellfire beat the shit out of both of them.
In something under three minutes, she stood alone in that antiseptic but now hardly sterile chamber. At her feet,
untidily sprawled, lay both uniformed guards. One had drawn his stopper. It had not helped him against a silently
raging tigress.
Hellfire was not quite winded. Naked and gleaming, she picked up that stopper. Then the other, which she extracted
from the medseccer's holster-and rapped the girlish-looking young woman with it, in her nicely de-veloped but overly
pointy breast, hard.
Stopper in each hand, stark naked, gleaming and presumably microbe-free-and triumphant, not to men-tion angry-
Hellfire padded briskly to the green door; the Out door. She knew she'd been in here longer than the prescribed time,
and without decontamination. But she was sure the door would be unlocked, waiting for those two furbags to drag her
out.
Yet when she crossed the scanner's invisible beam the door did not open.
Instead, the emergency plate in it did. Gas puffed in, directly into her face.
"Oh you duty bast-" Hellfire said, with diminishing vehemence, and that was all. She crumpled like a dropped
curtain and her lights went out.
3


" . . . just watching the way that Outie conferred with them," Jahl told the inspector? "Talked to them, I mean-
to them. Then all of a sudden, within two or three mins after they'd went in, the two Seccers come running out of the
H-l navel. They ran straight to the spoke and out of my view. On the way the sergeant said something to the Outie,
just as she ran by-Falger, you said?"
"Traf-al-grr Cue," the inspector said, "Yes. Outies may not get much, they say, but they certainly do get names!"
"Trafalgar Cuw." Jahl grinned. "Yeah! Well, while she went running past, the sergeant called something to
Tra-fal-grr Cuw, and he waved. Big full sleeve waving like a flag on a pole with the wind up. But then he frowned, just
watching after her, and turned to the others with him. The blond and the Jarp."
"Um-hmm. The sergeant is a she, I gather. I believe you didn't mention that before, Jahl."
The stevedore sat up rather straighter and stared. "Does it matter, Inspector?" she demanded, and for the first tune
she looked fully confident. As a matter of fact she looked ready to bite.
The inspector held up both hands. "No no, Jahl. Not
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to TGO, and not to me," she assured the stevedore. "Well, yes it does. Good for her-the sergeant!"
"Right." Jahl nodded, stoutly holding her gaze, and suddenly old basilisk eyes broke down. Both women smiled.
Then Jahl went on with her narrative.
"That's about it. Farg-the Seccer who let me up there in the Security tower to watch-got real busy. And my break
was ending, and the Outie-Trafalgar- was huddling with the blond and the Jarp. You know . . . grabbles, Inspector, I'm
damned if I can see how this has helped TGO, but I got to admit that it's been fun!"
"Beats working, hmm? Let me just double check a couple of points, Jahl," the inspector said, again glanc-ing briefly
at her chronometer.

"My dearest darlings," Trafalgar Cuw said, "that was odd. Here is how I read it. Dear Sergeant Cosi is on to us. She
just ran past, looked self-conscious when she looked at me and called out something banal, and away they went in a
big hurry. Why? Rushing to put the screws on the captain, I'd say."
Cinnabar said-via the system of straps and electron-ically active studs that formed a sort of openwork hel-met on
its violently red-maned head-"Oh shit."
"Probably," Trafalgar said, nodding.
Janja gazed thoughtfully in the direction of the spoke, which looked like the darkish, wide-open mouth of a giant
worm. "And here we are. With two aliens on-board, these Josers will want to take and question and question and
examinate and decontaminate and test and question some more. And two bags of gems and pre-cious metals we