"Perry, Steve - Matador 01 - The Man Who Never Missed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

The first soldier was so easy it made Khadaji sad. He walked to within five meters without being noticed. The boy he could have been no older than twenty-two or three stood in the shade of a small fir tree. It was not particularly warm, but he wore class two body gear, and it didn't take much to heat up the inside of that to sweatpoint. The boy had shifted his goggles up and his tight hood back, exposing his face and head to the cooler air. If Khadaji had been an uprank, the boy would have been in trouble.

"Excuse me, which way is Hartman Street?"

The boy turned, surprised. He started to swing the Parker up, but stopped. What he saw was a tall man in orthoskins, palms supinated, looking harmless.

"Jeet, dork, don't slip up on a man like that!" He seemed to relax a little, seeing that Khadaji was unarmed and smiling.

The Shamba Scum shrugged, raised his left hand slightly, and stiffened his index finger. "Sorry," he said.

The little dart hit the boy high on the forehead and snapped his face upward; the Spasm hit him on the way down and he was in the lock before he touched the ground. The strongest muscles determined the shape of the knot; this one had strong quads and triceps his arms and legs stuck out.

Khadaji shook his head. There was no joy in this. The boy would be able to tell all about the man who shot him in six months, if he were lucky. Meanwhile, he would spend an uncomfortable time thinking about his actions on this day. Spasm froze the muscles but neither the memory nor the mind which drove it. He wouldn't be able to call out, but he would remember how stupid he had been. A harsh punishment for a boy, but it was necessary. All of it was necessary, for reasons this soldier couldn't begin to understand, even if Khadaji had hours to explain it to him.

Unlike the first, the second man wore his armor and class two would stop a spetsdod's dart but the armor wasn't perfect. Gloves and hoods were designed to overlap but the material had to be thin in places for a man to move; knees and elbows and shoulders had to bend or rotate. When the soldier stretched, after two minutes, Khadaji fired. The fle-chette entered the thin fold behind the man's left knee, a line only a few millimeters wide. It was a difficult shot, but an expert with a spetsdod could cut a dragonfly in half in mid-air and hit both pieces as they fell. Point-shooting had been brought to a peak higher than craft, if not art, with the invention of the spetsdod: the word itself meant "point death." The brush came alive with the canvas-rip sound of a Parker carbine on full automatic; bushes and trees blew apart, explosive shells chopped them down from waist-level. Khadaji was on the ground and crawling before the first leaves fluttered to the forest floor. The third man had been spooked. Maybe he'd heard or sensed something, maybe one of the others managed to trigger a com. It didn't matter. He was shooting at shades, but he would have called for backup. Khadaji crawled at right angles to the line of fire until he was clear, then stood and ran. Thorns tried to dig into the tough orthoskins, but failed. He dodged trees and larger shrubs, but ran over the small stuff. There was no time for finesse, he had to be a long way from here when help arrived.

He cleared the forest and was among a line of warehouses in the storage district. He stopped. Behind him, half a klick back, the scared soldier was still cutting shrubbery with his weapon.

There were few ways to disguise a spetsdod on the back of the hand. Khadaji loosened the plastic flesh which connected the two weapons to his body and pulled the flechette guns free. He found a trash bin full of scrap metal and buried the weapons deeply in it. It wouldn't matter if they were found since he had others the better part of a case of them from the shipment he'd stolen. Twenty spetsdods and ten thousand rounds of Spasm darts and that number, ten thousand, was very important.

Although he felt naked without the weapons, Khadaji stepped out onto the street as if he owned it and started toward the Jade Flower. He would have plenty of time to get there and collect another pair of spetsdods before his last station was due. So far, he'd only taken out five of the Confed's finest, and he needed at least eight more to maintain his schedule. He wanted to average a hundred a week, but it was getting harder all the time. He'd been at it for almost six months and the first troops would be coming out of lock pretty soon. When that began to happen, it would be over. Even if the confed military tried to lid it, word would eventually get out that only one man's description kept coming up. They wouldn't believe it, of course, not at first, but it would plant a seed. They would never admit that one man could mimic hundreds military PR would smash the idea flat, that thousands of trained troops could be downed by a single assassin. But if they knew, it would be over fast. They were looking for guerrillas in packs, not the owner and operator of the Jade Rower, the biggest recreational chemical pub in the city, a man whose business depended on the military, as customers and patrons. Soldiers needed rec-chem almost as much as they needed sex and the Jade Flower supplied both in abundance. More than a few of the Sub-Befals spent time there. Khadaji made certain that upranks got the best whores, male and female, and the first drink or toke or pop was always on the house to anybody over line-grade. He was a popular man, Khadaji was.

So, two more stations, six more hits. He sighed. Nearly six months, and he was getting tired. He didn't waver from his purpose that was as clear as ever but he was tired. Not much longer. Not many more.

He sighed again, and hurried along the street. A quad passed him, going the other way. The men all smiled and nodded at him. He smiled back. He would probably see them later.

One way or another.

Chapter Two

THE JADE FLOWER was always open. Before the Confed had honored Greaves with its massive squat tactics, the rec-chem pub had been only a small-time operation, serving the locals a narrow spectrum of alcohol and soporifics, minor hallucinogens and mood elevators. Two or three part-time prostitutes took care of anybody interested in buying sex, and the operation was, at best, a break-even proposition. With the coming of the military and its civilian support population, the character of the Jade Flower was bound to change. A greedy and well-prepared man would have made a fortune, but the previous owner was old and tired and not ready to deal with the influx of soldiers, bored spouses and children the Confed bent to the sleepy planet. When Khadaji arrived and waved enough standards under his nose, the old man was glad to sell.

Khadaji looked around the main room of the pub. It was early, not yet 1600, but already the place was crowded. Even with local zoning regs relaxed, there was usually a line of customers outside, waiting for someone to leave in order to enter. Khadaji always kept a dozen or so places open, for any highly-ranked officers who might be interested in a toke, poke or drink. Anjue, the doorman, had studied the holoproj of every uprank over the level of Lojt and if one showed up, he or she was escorted to the head of the line and inside. Rank, as always, had its privileges. The troops-of-the-line might gripe, but the powers-that-be all smiled at Khadaji when they saw him.

The main room, which was octagonal and dimly-lighted, boasted sixty circular tables with four stools each. The first thing Khadaji had done on buying the pub was to have the stools and tables bolted securely to the floor. He'd had thirty people applying for the job of bouncer and their first test was to see if they could move the furniture. Two men managed to uproot a stool each; one woman set herself and screamed, then tore the top of a table off its mount. And then well, she was clever. The rest failed. Khadaji had longer bolts installed and hired the two men and woman who'd proved strongest. If a fight broke out, nobody was going to be bashing anybody with his furniture; and before it got too far, Bork, Sleel or Dirisha would be there to stop it. It was difficult to argue with a man holding you a half-meter off the floor, or a woman who could break three ribs with a flat punch. There was very little trouble in the Jade Flower.

"Ho, Emile, how's it hanging?"

Khadaji looked to his right, to see Lojtnant Subru, smoking a flickstick. The man's dark face was almost hidden behind the cloud of purple-black smoke.

'To the left, Subbie, just like always." He grinned. "How's the ratface job?"

Lojtnant Subru shook his head and exhaled a fragrant blast of flickstick smoke. The smell of hot cashews surrounded Khadaji. "Busy today, Emile. Word is there were several skirmishes within fifty klicks of town."

Khadaji raised an eyebrow and tried to look surprised. "Really? Get any of the Scum?"

The dark soldier nodded. "Body count of fourteen, I heard. They nicked one of ours in a blastfight, but she's

okay."