"Jane Lindskold - Endpoint Insurance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lindskold Jane)

actual goods-folks would talk to me who would never talk to a more usual insurance
investigator. I played poker with smugglers and black-marketeers, hung out in seedy
spaceport bars. It didn’t take long to learn that the local operators were feeling
pressure from outside.
“It’s them Batherite refugees, Allie,” one smuggler told me. “It’s not just displaced
parents and sad-eyed kids who’ve come in on those ships. Somebody else has
come in with ‘em.”
A dealer in slightly-used ship parts nodded.
“My business has dried up,” she said, “just when things should be hot as a nuclear
plant. I nosed around a bit and learned that somebody else is selling-and not just
parts. I’ve seen ships come in that I could swear I’d seen listed as missing by the
Watch.”
“And the black ships don’t interfere?” I asked, Normally the members of the Silent
Watch couldn’t wait to cause trouble for people.
“I guess they try,” the black-marketeer shrugged, “but what can they do if the
registration is all in order?”
Another smuggler, one who augmented a perfectly legitimate business carrying food
supplies by transporting the occasional crate of high-duty luxury goods, added:
“I’ve been hit, too. You should see what’s being sold in the market at the edge of
the Bathtub. Oh, on the surface they’re just poor folks trying to make do by selling
homemade delicacies or whatever they salvaged before they got off planet, but if you
keep your eyes open, you’ll see that they’re selling things that no refugee could have
grabbed.”
“Like?” I said, reaching for the deck of cards-it was my turn to deal.
‘“Like,” the food merchant said, ’‘cases of stabilized wines in the kind of packing
that the luxury cruisers use. I swear I caught a glimpse of the Orion Lines logo on
the side of one crate. It had been painted over, but you could still see the curves.“
He didn’t need to add more. The word “pirates.” though unspoken, hung in the air.
The suspicion of pirates also answered the question of why these normally feisty
outlaws weren’t going after the competition. No spacers in their right mind tangled
with pirates. The pirates’ reach was too long and their methods of retribution too
ruthless.
I wondered what I’d let Spike get me into.
Obviously, the place for me to continue my hunt was the Batherite refugee section
that the news services had dubbed-rather derisively-the Bathtub.
Early the next morning, I put the Mercury into a parking orbit, then hailed one of
Endpoint’s squat, in-system shuttles to take me down to the main planet’s
largest-and pretty much only-city.
Endpoint’s major inhabited planet was named Gilbert, after the explorer who had
organized the initial colony group. The capital city, with great originality, was called
Gilbert City. It had started out as a couple of pressurized domes meant to protect
the colonists from whatever secret horrors the planet might hold. The domes weren’t
bad. In fact, I’d grown up in similar structures.
Once the colonists confirmed that the worst hazards were weather-related, they
tailored their architecture to combat these. It wasn’t long before Gilbert City
sprawled out around the original domes. These had eventually been torn down and
recycled, leaving no trace of that historical first settlement other than the position of
the main spaceport.
When the shuttle unloaded at the spaceport, I hopped a tube to the end of the line
where the Bathtub had evolved into a small town of its own.