"Roberts, John Maddox - Cingulum 03 - The Sword, The Jewel and the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberts John Maddox)

"Come sit at our table. We always buy newcomers a drink."
"That's hospitable of you." They took the remains of 36
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their beers to the table as another deafening hailstorm began. All conversation stopped of necessity until the storm passed. Haakon took the opportunity to study the table's other inhabitant. He was another short man, stumpy where the bluebeard was slender. Obviously a local, he was dressed in old, worn armor decorated with a string of big beads passing over one shoulder and beneath the opposite arm. His head and face were cleanshaven and heavily scarred.
"I'm Serge LeMat. This is Hori Soun, the abbot of Amida Temple in New Kaga Province." Besides the usual sword, the abbot wore a long dirk and the hand-plates of his armor had spikes over the knuckles. His was clearly not one of the pacifist sects. Haakon made introductions all around. The proposition arrived before the first round of drinks.
"You have a good ship?" croaked the abbot in a voice that fitted his frog face. "Fast? Able to make lengthy voyages?"
"That's right," Haakon said. "Are ships of some interest to you?"
"We'd like to talk a little business," LeMat said. "I'm afraid my colleague here is a little precipitate."
"We're not here for business," Haakon said. "Just routine repair and maintenance, maybe take on a few stores, the usual. This is pretty good beer, for instance; I might order a few hundred liters."
"Of course," LeMat said, "it goes without saying that you aren't here for business. On the other hand, I never saw a free trader who wasn't interested in a little
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serendipitous action that might fall his way by chance, especially if it looked profitable."
"If it isn't profitable," Haakon pointed out, "it isn't business. However, I have no licenses or permits to trade on this world. You know how stuffy the Bahadurans can be about people treading on their commercial corns. It's not worth it to me to lose my trading license, not to mention my freedom, my ship, and maybe my head, just for a little impromptu cargo run."
"There's really no reason to trouble the authorities about this," LeMat assured him. "Poor dears, they work so hard as it is. Let's just leave them out of this, shall we?" The man was all bland assuredness.
"Smuggling?" Haakon asked. He looked around. "Isn't this place a little public to be discussing such things?"
"Who's talking about smuggling?" LeMat asked, his eyes widening in a parody of innocence. "What we need to transport isn't contraband."
"Then why not just hire space on a commercial freighter?" Jemal asked.
"You know how tedious that would be," LeMat said. "There're forms to go through and questions to answer and we really would rather not involve the authorities."
"Why not?" Haakon asked. "Since, as you say, your cargo isn't contraband."
"Oh, the items themselves are perfectly legal. You could walk through the port with them dangling from your fist and nobody'd say boo to you. It's the matter of their destination that's tricky, you see. The Bahadurans
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are picky about items leaving the worlds they claim, especially this one. It's not enough to send something off this planet; you also have to state where it's going and it has to go there with no side trips."
Now we reach the crux of the matter, Haakon thought. "All right, where do you want these mysterious items to
go?"
LeMat leaned close. "Have you people ever heard of a place called the Cingulum?"
39
Three
SENIOR SUBADAR HULAGU SWEATED IN HIS BATTLE ARMOR as the transport bore him and his squad along the road from the BT encampment to Masamune. BT armor was supposed to maintain a steady, optimum body temperature and process any excess perspiration, but nothing seemed to work properly on this hellhole of a world. The transport had lightly armored sides to waist height and an armored roof. Each man held a short beam rifle upright by his side, with its power jack plugged into the forearm of his armor.
"I think I saw an oni back there," the driver said to Hulagu. "It was in the trees, ducked back just as I caught sight of it. Want to go after it, Noyon?"
Hulagu considered. Two of his men had been eaten by oni in the last thirty-day cycle. But the ghastly creatures were hard to kill, and hunting them sometimes multiplied
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the problem. When the unit had first come here, an oni had been seen lurking outside the camp perimeter. A sentry had cut it in two with a heavy-duty beamer. By the time Hulagu had gone out to investigate, the two halves had crawled off into the bush. Within ten days, they had two full-sized oni to contend with.
"Let it go," Hulagu said. "This near the town it will only eat locals, which it may do with my blessing." He sat back but did not relax his vigilance. Occasionally, a needlenose would come buzzing for the men, but someone would swiftly shoot it before it got near enough to do any harm. All of Hulagu's men were superb shots, although few could cut the insects from the air with swords as the locals could.
They passed a small Buddhist shrine, and again he cursed the Bahadur policy of not interfering with local religion. It made him feel slightly disloyal to resent a government policy, but it had been formulated for worlds where religion was a stabilizing, rather than a rebellion-fomenting element. The one saving grace was that here the various sects fought each other almost as ferociously as they did the Bahadurans.
By the time they reached the town, the stones of the most recent hailstorm had melted and already the air was dusty. It never failed to amaze Hulagu that a place with so much precipitation could be so dusty. Like everything else here, all the elements conspired to annoy human interlopers. The transport pulled into the little town plaza and settled to its landing struts, which adjusted their height to keep the vehicle level.
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Hulagu climbed from his seat and blinked away the sweat that seeped from beneath his helmet. "Don't wander too far from the transport," Hulagu warned the squad. "Avoid trouble with the locals, but if you're attacked, kill them. I don't want our infirmary or our stockade cluttered with prisoners."
The men dismounted and stretched. They were not the usual Bahaduran troops, recruited from the lower classes. The Black Tumans were recruited exclusively from the best families, and most of the men were tall, with the narrow features common to the aristocratic caste of Bahadur. They despised the stocky, round-faced natives of Chamuka and the sentiment was richly reciprocated.
Hulagu and his men had no particular reason for visiting Masamune today, but it was wise to remind people of their presence from time to time. The sight of the black armor brought the usual scowls and spittings from the natives, but there was no immediate hostile action. He looked toward the communal tavern, where the troublemakers were usually to be found. The place was nearly empty, but his gaze was drawn back to a shaven-headed man at one of the tables. Bald men were common here, since about half the male population were adherents of one Buddhist sect or another, but this man did not look like a local. Something about him stirred a memory.
"Stay here," he said to his men as he walked toward the tavern.
"Trouble, Captain?" murmured Soong. All conversa-
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tion had stopped upon the appearance of the BT wagon. Now an officer wearing a Subadar insignia was coming toward them.
"No problem," Haakon said. "We're just law-abiding spacers, after all." He had a feeling that Soong meant more than just ordinary BT trouble. Had they run into this Subadar before?
The officer mounted the veranda and came straight to their table. "You're new here," he said.