"Hunting the Snark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

who had heard of him, and none of them went on safari with me. But I kept it anyway. There are a lot of Daniels walking around; at least I’m the only Karamojo.)

At that time I worked for Silinger & Mahr, the oldest and best-known firm in the safari business. True, Silinger died sixty-three years ago and Mahr followed him six years later and now it’s run by a faceless corporation back on Deluros VIII, but they had better luck with their name than I had with mine, so they never changed it.

We were the most expensive company in the business, but we were worth it. Hundreds of worlds have been hunted out over the millennia, but people with money will always pay to have first crack at territory no one else has set foot on or even seen. A couple of years ago the company purchased a ten-planet hunting concession in the newly opened Albion Cluster, and so many of our clients wanted to be the first to hunt virgin worlds that we actually held drawings to see who’d get the privilege. Silinger & Mahr agreed to supply one professional hunter per world and allow a maximum of four clients per party, and the fee was (get ready for it!) twenty million credits. Or eight million Maria Theresa dollars, if you don’t have much faith in the credit–and out here on the Frontier, not a lot of people do.

We pros wanted to hunt new worlds every bit as much as the clients did. They were parceled out by seniority, and as seventh in line, I was assigned Dodgson IV, named after the woman who’d first charted

it a dozen years ago. Nine of us had full parties. The tenth had a party of one–an incredibly wealthy man who wasn’t into sharing.

Now, understand: I didn’t take out the safari on my own. I was in charge, of course, but I had a crew of twelve blue-skinned humanoid Dabihs from Kakkab Kastu IV. Four were gunbearers for the clients. (I didn’t have one myself; I never trusted anyone else with my weapons.) To continue: one was the cook, three were skinners (and it takes a lot more skill than you think to skin an alien animal you’ve never seen before without spoiling the pelt), and three were camp attendants. The twelfth was my regular tracker, whose name–Chajinka–always sounded like a sneeze.

We didn’t really need a pilot–after all, the ship’s navigational computer could start from half a galaxy away and land on top of a New Kenya shilling–but our clients were paying for luxury, and Silinger & Mahr made sure they got it. So in addition to the Dabihs, we also had our own personal pilot, Captain Kosha Mbele, who’d spent two decades flying one-man fighter ships in the war against the Sett.

The hunting party itself consisted of four business associates, all wealthy beyond my wildest dreams if not their own. There was Willard Marx, a real estate magnate who’d developed the entire Roosevelt planetary system; Jaxon Pollard, who owned matching chains of cut-rate supermarkets and upscale bakeries that did business on more than a thousand worlds; Philemon Desmond, the