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

CEO of Far London’s largest bank–with branches in maybe two hundred systems–and his wife, Ramona, a justice on that planet’s Supreme Court.

I don’t know how the four of them met, but evidently they’d all come from the same home world and had known each other for a long time. They began pooling their money in business ventures early on, and just kept going from one success to the next. Their most recent killing had come on Silverstrike, a distant mining world. Marx was an avid hunter who had brought trophies back from half a dozen worlds, the Desmonds had always wanted to go on safari, and Pollard, who would have preferred a few weeks on Calliope or one of the other pleasure planets, finally agreed to come along so that the four of them could celebrate their latest billion together.

I took an instant dislike to Marx, who was too macho by half. Still, that wasn’t a problem; I wasn’t being paid to enjoy his company, just to find him a couple of prize trophies that would look good on his wall, and he seemed competent enough.

The Desmonds were an interesting pair. She was a pretty woman who went out of her way to look plain, even severe; a well-read woman who insisted on quoting everything she’d read, which made you wonder which she enjoyed more, reading in private or quoting in public. Philemon, her husband, was a mousy little man who drank too much, drugged too much, smoked too much, seemed in awe of his wife, and actually wore a tiny medal he’d won in a school

track meet some thirty years earlier–probably a futile attempt to impress Mrs. Desmond, who remained singularly unimpressed.

Pollard was just a quiet, unassuming guy who’d lucked into money and didn’t pretend to be any more sophisticated than he was–which, in my book, made him considerably more sophisticated than his partners. He seemed constantly amazed that they had actually talked him into coming along. He’d packed remedies for sunburn, diarrhea, insect bites, and half a hundred other things that could befall him, and jokingly worried about losing what he called his prison pallor.

We met on Braxton II, our regional headquarters, then took off on the six-day trip to Dodgson IV. All four of them elected to undergo DeepSleep, so Captain Mbele and I put them in their pods as soon as we hit light speeds, and woke them about two hours before we landed.

They were starving–I know the feeling; DeepSleep slows the metabolism to a crawl, but of course it doesn’t stop it or you’d be dead, and the first thing you want to do when you wake up is eat–so Mbele shagged the Dabihs out of the galley, where they spent most of their time, and had the cook prepare a meal geared to human tastes. As soon as they finished eating, they began asking questions about Dodgson IV.

"We’ve been in orbit for the past hour, while the ship’s computer has been compiling a detailed topographical map of the planet,"