"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 11 - The Iceworld Connection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

little fear. Penejac fought it, kept it under firm control. His training had
seen to that. Still, he was keyed. This is it. Today's the day. Now's the
time. A crewmate passing him in the tunnel reached out to clap him on the
shoulder. "Hello, Sparky." Penejac nodded and kept walking. The man was a
technician whom he knew and disliked. The fobber had fits of unpredictable
violence. Penejac did not-although he was more than capable of violence. He
was deep cover this time, posing as an engineer on the pirate spacer. It had
taken months to get this far. Months of lying and deceit among these swine.
Months of working side by side with men he couldn't stand. It was the ancient
cliche: a dirty job-but-someone-had-to-do-it. He had drawn the short
straw. Too much hijacking and too much drug traffic. It formed a pattern,
after a while. It had to be stopped. 2 Almost desperately, Tri-System Police
had sent him undercover. They had no idea that he had an even deeper
cover. The hijacker-ships' crews were drawn from the dregs of a multitude of
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planets. The one thing they had in common was a willingness to ride the outlaw
trail, to prey on human weakness. They dealt in the newly developed
permutation of tetrazombase. Para-TZ was the most insidious drug humankind had
ever developed. A microgram of para-TZ induced uncontrollable ecstasy. Taken
to excess-as it invariably was by those under its irresistible spell-it
brought on paralysis and a very ugly death. The thought of D'oona made
Penejac's jaw tighten. He could still remember the long black hair that
cascaded down her back, her friendly smile of greeting. She was the only
halfway decent person he had met on the ship. She had become almost a friend.
Perhaps she would have been, under different circumstances. Or more than a
friend. Instead, she had died. She had died horribly. D'oona's life had been
twisted by bad luck and bad companions. Fate had broken her back over the
years and led her to link herself with the pirates. After that it was all
downhill. She had seen something in Penejac- maybe a spark of goodness in the
man they knew as Sparky-even while he posed as one of them. A smuggler. He had
seen that decency in her, too. It was well submerged and even camouflaged, but
it was there. He had tried to pull it out. He had failed. She had taken the
easy way out, which was eventually the hard way. In a fruitless attempt to
sidestep the pain in her life, D'oona had turned to para-TZ. He could still
see her swollen face, twisted in agony, her once beautiful features lost in
the black rages of unbearable suffering. She had died in his arms, wanting
only more of the drug that was killing her. Penejac knew the agonies that had
rocked her fever- 3 ish mind in her last few minutes. It hurt him and the hurt
went in and in. So did his knowledge that similar ugly scenes were being
played out all along the spaceways. Across the galaxy, a hundred thousand
addicts a day were dying just such miserable deaths. The only freedom from
their suffering was that eventual, inevitable death. D'oona had made it
personal. Now Penejac hated the smugglers with a genuine personal passion. He
despised the drug and what it did to innocent people. Now at last it was time
to act-to bring down the roof on this slimy crew. Now he loved his job! The
ship was one of an incredible covey of four pirate craft. Big ships, all
heavily armed and stuffed with para-TZ. Extracted from broadleaf harvested on