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

"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 tricepsтАФhis 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 himтАФ 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 armorтАФand class two would stop a
spetsdod's dartтАФbut 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-airтАФand 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