"Timothy Zahn - Night Train to Rigel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

different transfer stations.
Now, it seemed, she was also going to be traveling on my Quadrail.
The fact that we'd spent a week on the same space vessels was no big deal in
and of itself, of course. There was only one practical set of scheduled flight
connections between the Atlantic side of the Western Alliance and the Quadrail
transfer station. Anyone who had decided to take a trip to the stars within a
three- or four-day window had no choice but to fly with me.
My problem was that The Girl didn't seem to fit any of the standard passenger
profiles. I hadn't seen her mingle with any of the other travelers, or even
speak to the attendants except on business. Space travel had its share of the
shy and the aloof and the just plain oblivious, but most of those eventually
gravitated to one activity or another aboard ship, even if it was just to wrap
themselves in a cocoon of stargazing silence in one of the observation
lounges. I'd made it a point to periodically wander through all the public
areas of the torchliner, and I'd never seen The Girl outside her cabin except
during meals or an occasional visit to one of the shops. She hadn't even shown
up for the shipboard Christmas celebration.
I gazed at her back now as we walked down the corridor toward the debarkation
lounge, watching the light glint off her short, dark brown hair. She was about
twenty-two, a decade younger than I was, with eyes that matched the color of
her hair and the slender, trim figure of someone who exercised to keep in
shape, as opposed to someone who did hard physical labor for a living. Her
face was pretty enough, but there was a strange sort of distance to her eyes
that was more than a little disconcerting. Possibly one reason I'd never seen
anyone aboard the torchliner approach her more than once.
And there was one other peculiarity I'd noted during our flight: Never had I
seen her pay for anything with a credit tag. With her, apparently, it was
strictly cash sticks.
Of course, I wasn't using anything but cash sticks, either. But I had good
reasons for not wanting anyone to trace my recent movements. Not with the body
I'd left back at the New Pallas Towers.
I wondered what reasons The Girl had.
The shuttle was already loading when our restaurant contingent arrived. I made
my way inside, found a seat, and threw my bags up onto the safety-webbed
conveyer that would carry them up to the roof luggage hatchway. Fifteen
minutes later we undocked. Passing beneath the guns and missile ports of the
Terran Confederation battle platform floating overhead like a brooding
predator, we started across the final fifty-kilometer leg of our journey to
the Quadrail station.
I gazed out the window as we approached, half listening to the murmurs and
twitterings from the first-timers among us. The Quadrail Tube lay across the
starscape straight ahead, a shiny metal cylinder stretching seemingly to
infinity in both directions. Despite its sheen, it was strangely difficult to
see until you were practically on top of it, which was probably why a hundred
years of outer-system probes had drifted through the space around Jupiter
without ever noticing this thing sitting just beyond its orbit.
The ends of the Tube were even harder to see, fading away in both directions
as the whole thing receded into the strange hyperspace where most of it lay.
There had been a few attempts to follow the cylinder out to those vanishing
points, but no matter how far you went, the Tube seemed perfectly solid the