"Ann Maxwell - Fire Dancer 2 - Dancer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maxwell Ann)

Black Whole, and a sizable amount of money. She would not mind getting her hands on
the latter, but the former she would gladly avoid. She looked at the people around her,
overflowing the control room and tubular hail, packing the tiny galley and crew quarters,
stacked breast to back in the exercise room until only tiredness kept them from turning on
each other with snarls of outraged privacy. “Onan.” She sighed and began to climb back
into the pilot’s mesh.

“Wait,” said Kirtn.

Rheba’s cinnamon eyes searched his. “More bad news.” It was not a question.

Kirtn whistled a Bre’n curse. “Our navtrix.”

“Yes?”

“It didn’t recognize any of the planet names we tried on it.”

“What? But—” She stopped, then turned her attention to the silver snake draped around
Kirtn’s neck. “Did you try languages besides Universal?”

Fssa flexed, taking time to create the proper internal arrangements to speak Senyas. It
would have been less trouble to whistle Bre’n, but when Rheba’s eyes sparked gold in
their depths, Fssa knew that precision was preferable to poetry. “Where planet names
could be translated into other languages, I did. The navtrix,” he said primly, “was
completely unresponsive. Onan is the only Yhelle Equality planet it acknowledges. Kirtn
told me you programmed in Onan yourself, long after you left Deva.”

Rheba whistled a sour Bre’n comment. Their navtrix had been made by her own people.
It reflected the extent—and limitations—of their knowledge. On her home world of
Deva, the Equality had not even been a myth. In order to take the slaves packed aboard
the ship to their far-flung homes, she would have to get her hands on a Yhelle Equality
navtrix.

Fssa darkened as he mentally translated Rheba’s whistle into its Universal equivalent.
When he spoke again, his voice was coaxing rather than arch. “I’ll keep trying, fire
dancer. Maybe one of the new languages I’ve learned will help.” Then he added,
brightening visibly, “Twenty-three of the slaves want to get off on Onan.”

“How many does that leave, Kirtn?”

His torso moved in a muscular Bre’n shrug. “I gave up trying to count at sixty.”

“On a ship built for twenty and modified for two.” She stretched, brushing against Kirtn.
“Take us into orbit around Onan. I’ll see if Ilfn needs help with the lottery.” She scooped
Fssa off Kirtn’s shoulders. With a delighted wriggle, the Fssireeme vanished into her
hair. Next to a live volcano or ground zero in a lightning storm, Rheba’s energetic hair
was the snake’s favorite place to be.

As Rheba began to work through the people toward the tube way, two compact brown
forms appeared. M/dere and M/dur quickly cleared a path for Rheba. No one, not even