"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Hunters of the Red Moon - 1973" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

The Mekhar at the console said-his voice was now amplified, for evidently he had thrown some control which made it come over the speaker as well, "We have five for you, Hunters. They are special prime dangerous ones, and we will not sell them cheaply."

The mechanical voice retorted, with its curious expressionless quality, "You Mekhars have done business with us before, and you know our requirements. Have these been pretested?"

"They have," said the Mekhar. "They are the four survivors of six ringleaders of the usual test escape mechanism-the ones who were intelligent and resourceful enough to see a very small loophole left for escape, brave enough to take it in the face of nerve-guns, md strong enough to keep fighting after we showed them that we were aware of the plot. You will not be disappointed in them. We had hoped to have all six for you, but we were forced to kill two others before they could be subdued."

The mechanical voice said, "You spoke of _five Quarry for us."

"The fifth is one of our own," the Mekhar captain said. "He allowed the prisoners to disarm him and to seize his weapon. The other guard, when given the usual choice, chose to commit suicide rather than face his trial on Mekhar. This one exercised the other option-to sell himself as Quarry to the Hunters. His price will be given to his surviving relatives on Mekhar, so that he is free of obligations and can legally take this single chance of survival."

"We are always glad to accept a Mekhar as Quarry," the mechanical voice said. "We repeat the offer we have made before this, to accept your desperate criminals as Quarry at any time."

"And we repeat," the Mekhar at the console-communicator said, "that our people's honor will not allow us to be represented in the Hunt by criminals; but the guard was bested in an honorable duel, since we deliberately left a chance for the prisoners to escape; he has the legal option to choose his own death, and he has the right to choose to die at your hands if he so wishes, honorably."

"We bow to your rules of honor," said the mechanical voice. "We suggest a bonus of ten percent over our usual price; if this is acceptable to you, you may land the prisoners at once."

"That is acceptable to us," the Mekhar confirmed, but Dane's attention was drawn to Rianna, who had drawn in a great gasping sob.

'The Hunters," she whispered. "Then they're not just a legend! A chance for escape-yes, a chance-but oh, Gods, _what a chance!"

Dane twisted in his seat, but before he could say another word to her, the Mekhar captain approached them.

"Prisoners," he said quietly. "Your chance of escape, or honorable death, is upon you. You have proven that you are too brave, too courageous, to be sold as slaves; it is, therefore, our honor and our pleasure to provide you this alternative. Do not be afraid. You are about to be given a small dose of a mild anesthetic gas, which will have no lasting side effects, so that you need not be harmed by struggling in the transit to the Hunters' World. Let me congratulate you, and wish you all an honorable escape, or a bloody and honorable death."



CHAPTER SIX



When the mists of the anesthetic gas began to clear from Dane's mind, he found himself lying on a low, soft bed, with a silky-smooth covering. Rianna lay unconscious beside him; Dallith on a similar couch nearby. Aratak was stretched on the floor; as Dane sat up the great grayish lizard-man stretched painfully, yawned, and sat up too. He looked around him and his eyes met Dane's.

"About one thing, at least, our captors told the truth," he said quietly. "We have not been harmed. How is it with the women?"

Dane leaned over Rianna; her breast was rising and falling naturally, as with sleep. Dallith began to stretch sleepily; sat up, looking around in quick panic; saw them and relaxed, smiling.

"So here we all are again," Dane said.

The room in which they lay was very large, with high ceilings and pillars and columns, and had at one time been painted a sort of terra-cotta color; but the paint seemed faded and old, and there were spiderwebs and dust in the high corners, though the place seemed clean enough otherwise. Long windows, unglazed but partially shuttered with narrow bamboo-like slats, admitted a strange reddish sunlight. Outside the arched windows there were voices and sounds of falling water. Dane got up and walked to the windows, peering through the slats.

Outside was a wilderness of garden; flowering bushes, long stony paths, low trees with golden-colored cones or long red seed-pods; everywhere the pervasive green, although no single tree looked familiar to him.

_Unearthly, he thought, _and that is a very exact description. The sky was lowering and reddish, with great grayish masses of sunset cloud, and in the sky the huge moon he had seen from space hung low, glowing reddish and seeming to cast its own fiery-red light over the trees, the paths, the flowers, and the fountains of falling water which seemed to flow and gurgle everywhere in the enormous garden.

There were people on the paths. People, as Dane had begun to think of them from his days on the Mekhar slave ship; not a mixture of people and strange animals, just different kinds of people. They were all dressed in tunics of the same terra-cotta red as the walls of the room; human and nonhuman alike. There were people who seemed to Dane all but human, human as he was himself; there were some who reminded him vaguely of the Mekhars; there was at least one covered with fine woolly hair who looked like a taller, more alert gibbon or ape; there were too many to see and classify all at once. Another slave mart? No, the Mekhar had said, at last, that they were "too brave and courageous for slaves," whatever that meant. But the uniform brick-red tunics, and the close enclosure of the garden, told him that they had not yet reached freedom.

The variety of beings in the garden reminded him that when they left the ship their number had been five; and he looked about for the Mekhar who had, at the last, been imprisoned with them. He found him curled up, his head hidden between his hands, on another of the soft silken couches, evidently still sleeping.

"The gas wears off quickest on my kind," said Aratak from where he squatted before the window. "I was conscious again even before the small shuttle-ship landed us here. I repaid them by not resisting; I did not want to be separated from you, my companions. Now you are waking; and the Mekhar still sleeps. Evidently their metabolism differs from ours in some way. I hope he is not dead. Perhaps we should examine him and see-"