"Steve Perry - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Maro looked up at the mirrored window next to his seat. The face that stared
back at him certainly didn't look dangerous enough to be sent to Omega. The
reflected image had dark hair, not quite black, and sharp featuresтАФa thin nose
and lips, pale blue eyes, and a strong chinтАФor so he had been told, mostly by
women.

"Whatcha lookin' at, pretty boy?" Pig said.

Maro didn't bother to turn; he could see the guard's image in the mirror behind
him. He had mentally dubbed the two guards Snake and Pig, for their most
outstanding features. Snake was a whippet-thin man of maybe forty T.S., with
some kind of skin disease that made him both shiny and scaly; either that, or
maybe he was from one of the worlds where the bandit bioshifters still operated.
Or perhaps the condition was some kind of protective adaptation. Pig's face was
dominated by his nostrils, set in a nose that looked as if it had met too many

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walls at too high a rate of speed.

The two grinned unpleasantly at each other. "Why don't we show him the
place?" Snake said.

"Yeah. You want to see your new home, pretty boy?"

Maro continued to stare at his reflection. He said nothing. The two guards were
sadists, and he'd found the safest course was to ignore them as much as possible.

Pig touched his throat mike. "Take us down for the tour, Rouge. Pretty boy, he's
curious."

The skimmer began a fairly rapid descent. Maro turned away from the window
and stared straight ahead. He didn't want to play whatever game these creeps
were running. He suspected, however, that he didn't have much of a choice.

To Maro's left, Snake stroked a pressure-sensitive control on the latter's chair.
The window's photo optometrics kicked on and the thincris plate next to Maro
washed clear. Maro didn't want to look, but he knew if he were ever going to
escape from the Cage, he'd need all the information he could get. He turned
toward the viewport.

They were skimming perhaps a hundred meters above a swamp. Thick-boled
trees rose from dank, green water; the few patches of solid ground were covered
with brush, most of it in shades of mottled green, with occasional bursts of color;
flowers, birds, other animals he didn't recognize.

Some sort of animal, like an elephant with a short nose and lots of teeth, roared