"Nina Osier - Exile's End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Osier Nina M)

Exile's End



Exile's End




By Nina M. Osier




CHAPTER 1


It was a fine day for a kidnapping.

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 Exile's End



The Trade Fair was in full swing on the surface of Chaitanya, and there were scores of ships parked
in orbit around that less-than-hospitable world. The Trade Fair was held here, and not on a more inviting
planet (of which there were of course dozens - hundreds, even - within the uneven sphere of human-
settled space), simply because of its location; Chaitanya belonged to no group in particular, and to every
human in general. And just as importantly, it was somewhere near the physical center of the area regularly
plied by freighters and tankers and other such commercial starships; so gathering here at intervals that
followed the solar year of long-abandoned Earth was as workable as any such gathering pattern might
have been, although of course not every trader's House was represented at every annual Fair.

Valeria was always represented, though. Like most of the older Houses, that family held several
ships and deliberately scattered them across the established trade routes in order to cover as much territory
and consistently gain as much profit as possible. This year the old man's own ship, which according to
custom bore the House's name on its superstructure, was itself in orbit above Chaitanya Spaceport. Of
course, everyone in the trading community knew that Anders Valeria himself would probably take little
part in the Fair's proceedings; but he was there, and his ship rode in one of the more coveted orbits where
shuttle access could be had by an almost direct rise from the surface instead of by a circuitous routing in
order to avoid everyone else's orbits and everyone else's shuttles. Everyone respected Anders Valeria, and
because they knew the cause of his weakness almost everyone excused it by never mentioning it where
any of his family members could hear.

But everyone knew, of course, that Anders Valeria would spend most of his time in a wine-fog in
his cabin while his eldest child - a thirty-year-old son - ran things, for all intents and purposes as if his
father were already dead. When his fellow traders spoke of this at all, carefully out of the Valeria family's
hearing, they agreed that it was fortunate for everyone that Jock had both his father's gifts for starship
trading and his long-dead mother's calm, sober personality. If Anders had bred another like himself as his
firstborn, that ancient House would have been in deep difficulties by now. It had taken young Jock the