"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 17 - The Carnadyne Horde" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

something, by... someone. It was not the cybers' business, however, to
consider the poor starving children of Fill-In-The-Blank. That was of no
concern to their captain, either. The cybernetic member of Tura ak Saiping's
crew in the main cargo hold paused at a small crate marked with the TGW seal
and the words 300 EACH: MULTIFUNCTIONAL PERSONAL BEAM-SIDEARM: SONIC. Tura
paused, too. She debated taking the crate of stoppers 12 onboard her spacer.
Enough stoppers there to arm a little army and start a revolution or rebellion
at the very least, she thought. Then she sneered at her own concept: Sure. And
be wiped out by TGO. No no, Tura, no one's doing that. If there were a
revolutionary force somewhere, wouldn't you love to know about it! Again she
answered her own thought to the contrary: No. Tura's a loner, and a loner I'll
stay. Still, all those stoppers would fetch a nice price. On the other hand,
her Black Dawn was the smallest ship able to utilize tachyon-conversion
systemry and still require a crew of only one. The Corsi-built Masoch Mark IV
had no lifeboats or landers for swooping down into gravity. Tura's ship was
built for speed, stealth-for piracy. It was not built for hauling freight. The
two crates already on their way to Black Dawn would fill its hold.
Reluctantly, Tura ordered the cyber to pass up the stoppers, despite the high
demand for weapons all along the spaceways. She hoped to find something more
valuable and less bulky. The cyber found just that, a moment later. A
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container the size of a go-bag lay strapped unpretentiously atop a shipper of
Bleak's only beer, Puce Ribbon. Even though separated by hundreds of meters of
vacuum, Tura reflexively wrinkled her nose. She thought of TransGalactic Watch
personnel as scum, as policer scum of the lowest sort, but such bad taste in
potables appalled her. Probably some subsidized export program that Bleak
can't afford anyway. Maybe the whole damned planet'II go broke close down. No
more Bleak! Who'd notice? She tapped in a command for the cyber to scan the
smaller container. She nodded, eyes narrowing. Drugs. Captured incidentally in
some raid on a slaver or pirate or smuggler 13 and being transported as
evidence, for storage. Or perhaps to a disposal facility. The cyber took it in
one "hand" and flew out. Back to Black Dawn. The last of her cybernetic crew
floated to the center of the ship. It was not a salvager. Its function was not
to take anything, but to leave something behind. Seeking the ship's center of
mass with its delicate sensors, the cyber drifted along corridor-tunnels,
always farther in. When it could go no farther, it released a cubic object
measuring a half-meter on a side. The cube drifted until it touched a
bulkhead, where it lightly adhered. Just a large building block, gray and
red. The cyber wended its way out of Abraxis. When Tura ak Saiping firmed that
all five cybercrew-members were safely onboard and had stored away their loot,
she moved Black Dawn out to a hundred kloms' distance and triggered the
Shockwave bomb left at the center of the freighter. She watched the spacer's
silent death in silence. The hull of Abraxis burst at several junctures. Fuels
and remaining atmosphere mushroomed out of the fractures, the debris expanding
from the ship like the blossoming of a rose. For a moment, the entire ship
quaked with interior shocks. Then something in the depths of the spacer flared
to the surface. Abraxis was shattered into a thousand pieces, as if struck