"Steve Perry - Matador 5 - The 97th Step" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Perry, Steve - The 97th Step


Scanned by Highroller and proofed more or less by Highroller.



Part One

The Seeker Asleep

Since love and fear can hardly exist together, it is far safer to be feared than
loved.

-MACHIAVELLI

THE SLAVER WAS about to buy trouble, though he didn't know it yet.

It was a spacers' pub, set in the run-down port section of Ch├╝sai Tomadachi, the
wheelworld that orbited the planet Tomadachi, in the Shin System. The stale air
was thick with flick-stick smoke and its smell of burned cashews, and the lighting
was cycled to dim, giving enough illumination to see but hiding the shabbiness of
the painted and scratched aluminum walls. The place thrummed with an
undercurrent of tough talk and menace, but it was outlaw swagger, and not the
force-backed brute power of the ConfedтАФthe upper castes would hardly demean
themselves by coming to a scum hole like this for recreation.

At a small expanded-aluminum mesh table against one wall, two men sat drinking
ale. Ashanti Khahil Stoll was a big man, pushing two meters, sheathed overall in a
thick layer of fat. He wore a plain gray orthoskin coverall that struggled to contain
his bulk, and he looked relatively harmless compared to many of the men and
mues in the pub.

His companion, also dressed in plain gray orthoskins, was something else. He was
called Ferret, and he had a cold look about him that seemed anything but harmless.
In his early thirties, he was perhaps three decades younger than Stoll. Ferret
viewed the scene through hard green eyes, and while his face and hands were pale,
neither looked soft. In a room full of dangerous men, these two were harder than

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 Perry, Steve - The 97th Step


most, and those who knew the biz but didn't know Ferret and Stoll stayed away
from their table. Mean dogs know how to avoid meaner ones.

Near the exit, the slaver stood glaring at his thrall.

Ferret stared at the slaver, then sipped at his ale. Slavery was illegal, of course, but
none of the pub's patrons was apt to worry about law, save how best to break it