"Timothy Zahn - The Icarus Hunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

The Icarus Hunt by Timothy ZahnTimothy Zahn
The Icarus Hunt

CHAPTER
1
THEY WERE WAITING as I stepped through the door into the taverno: three of
them,
preadult Yavanni, roughly the size of Brahma bulls, looming over me from both
sides of the entryway. Big, eager-eyed, and territorial, they were on the
prowl
and looking for an excuse to squash something soft.
From all indications, it looked like that something was going to be me.
I stopped short just inside the door, and as it swung closed against my back I
caught a faint whiff of turpentine from the direction of my would-be
assailants.
Which meant that along with being young and brash, they were also tanked to
the
briskets. I was still outside the invisible boundary of the personal
territories
they'd staked out for themselves in the entryway; and if I had any brains, I'd
keep it that way. Yavanni aren't very bright even at the best of times, but
when
you're outweighed by two to one and outnumbered by three to one, brainpower
ratio isn't likely to be the deciding factor. It had been a long day and a
longer evening, I was tired and cranky, and the smartest thing I could do
right
now was get hold of the doorknob digging into my back and get out of there.
I looked past the Yavanni into the main part of the taverno. The place was
pretty crowded, with both humans and a representative distribution of other
species sitting around the fashionably darkened interior. It was likely to
stay
well populated, too, at least as long as anyone who tried to leave had to pass
the three mobile mountains waiting at the door. A fair percentage of the
clientele, I could see, was surreptitiously watching the little drama about to
unfold, while the rest were studiously ignoring it. None of either group
looked
eager to leap to my defense should that become necessary. The two bartenders
were watching me more openly, but there would be no help from that direction,
either. This section of the spaceport environs lay in Meima's Vyssiluyan
enclave, and the Vyssiluyas were notoriously laissez-faire where disputes of
this sort were concerned. The local police would gladly and industriously pick
up the pieces after it was all over, but that wasn't going to be much comfort
if
I wound up being one of those pieces.
I looked back at the Yavanni flanking my path, one a little way ahead and to
my
left, the other two to my right. They still hadn't moved, but I had the mental
picture of coiled springs being tightened a couple more turns. I hadn't run,
didn't look like I was going to run, and their small minds were simmering in
eager anticipation of the moment when I put a foot across that invisible