"Perry, Steve - Matador 02 - Matadora" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Dirisha stood and glanced down at Tea-skin. There was no pain on the man's face, no tension in his muscles. The kinzoku dart had buried itself in his forehead; the brain-shock must have killed him. Tea-skin had checked out, there was no longer anybody home.

Dirisha felt cold, a coldness which reached deeply into her and touched something hidden there. This was not what she wanted, this was not what she had trained nearly half her life to become: a killer, someone who could calmly wipe away another human with as little effort as throwing a sliver of steel at a target. Why hadn't he quit? It was obvious she was better than he had been, it was illogical, it was stupid for him to continue after he was beaten! She found herself angry at Tea-skin she didn't even know his name for being so stupid. It was his fault, not hers!

No. Dirisha knew she was wrong. Sure, she had to defend herself, but the other was just rationalization. She was too good to have taken the easy way. She could have risked herself more and maybe put him down without killing him, she knew it. She had done her technique correctly, but she had failed in her Art. Suddenly, she felt very tired, as if she had climbed some tall high-gee mountain into thin and lifeless air.

She looked down at the corpse. Methodically, she retrieved the stainless steel kinzoku dart and wiped away the blood. This was a bad world to kill somebody on, the authorities on Tembo were harsh and difficult to convince of innocence under the best of circumstances. They were less than fond of cults and Musashi players would receive little sympathy, either killed or killers. It would be wise to leave, and quickly. There was no official registration of Hex players on Tembo, but it wouldn't take the cools long to figure out that Tea-skin had been such. Then, they'd be locked into suspects. Sure, it was self-dee, and any straight scan would back her story, but Dirisha had no desire to sit for some heavy-handed brain scrambler. People had been known to come out of such sessions wiped or nearly so especially if the simadam running the scan didn't like the subject. It could happen easily on this world.

Tea-skin was heavy, but she managed to shoulder the body and walk with it. Corpses were always heavy, being literally dead weight with no muscle tone to help; Dirisha counted herself unfortunate to know such things.

People who passed on the nearly-deserted street glanced at Dirisha and her load briefly, if at all, and if they wondered about her, they did not do so aloud. She staggered along for two blocks before she found a refuse container large enough to accept a man-sized object. Too bad there were no public flash disposals on Tembo, a decidedly backward world compared to some. With a grunt, Dirisha heaved the body into the trash container and covered the unit. He'd be found soon enough, but probably not until she had time to leave the planet. She had enough stads in her account to travel nearly anywhere in the galaxy; money meant little to her and she seldom spent it on anything other than the barest items of survival. She could go to any world she wished, but where did she want to go? She had learned as much of the local fighting art of T'umeaux as she cared to learn; after that, she had planned to try the wheel world of Chiisai Tomadachi, orbiting Tomadachi itself in the Shin System. There was supposedly a variant of kaiatsu, which actually worked, being taught to a handful of students there. She had heard of voice-stun styles, but had never seen one which was truly effective. So, Chiisai?

As she left the alley in which she'd dumped the corpse of the man who'd attacked her, Dirisha felt that earlier weariness latch onto her again, as though some kind of malignant leech had attached itself to her spirit. Her Id seemed to drain away, leaving her exhausted. For a moment, the idea of continuing to play the Flex seemed too much to bear, to even consider. But what else could she do? Settle into some bodyguard job? Become a bouncer permanently? Set up a school and teach what she had learned? She could do that, she was good enough to attract the best students.

The face of a man dead nearly three years floated up from her memory. She smiled at the recollection. She'd liked Khadaji, liked working for him. A lot of people had been very surprised when they'd found out what he'd really been doing on Greaves. Dirisha had always suspected there was more to him than met the eye he moved too well to be a simple pub owner on such a backrocket planet.

Dirisha kept the smile, but wondered why she was thinking about Khadaji now. Was it merely due to the death of Tea-skin, reminding her of another death? No, there was something else scratching at her memory. Something Khadaji had said to her once, shortly before he'd died. What was it, exactly? Something about being on some world in a few years... ah, she had it. He'd told her that Renault, also in the Shin System, would be a good place to be. A town called what was it? Complex? Vindox? No, it was ... Simplex. Simplex-by-the-Sea. A place she could stretch herself, he'd said. What had he meant by that? What had he been trying to tell her?

Dirisha walked the dark street on Tembo, oblivious to her surroundings; she wondered about Khadaji's cryptic comments, made three years past. Simplex-by-the-sea. It had a nice ring to it, it sounded peaceful and simple. Why not? She had no place else she had to go.

No place at all.

CHAPTER TWO

THROUGH THE DENSECRIS window of the boxcar, Dirisha could see a world which looked to be made mostly of water. She had read the standard promoscan on the Bender ship from Tembo, so she knew a little about the place: Renault, fifth from the primary, one of six inhabited worlds in the Shin System. The world had three continents, a tug equal to one-point-one gravities, oxy around twenty percent. Eight million nine hundred and sixty thousand or so inhabitants, mostly human, with a scattering of mues for flavor. They produced a lot of trees and vegetables on Renault and some refined metals, but not much of the last. And not much else. A backwater place, just like her homework! a place Dirisha didn't like to think about. So why was she here? Dropping in a rock-like glide from orbit, heading toward a village on the southwestern coast of the smallest of the small continents? Well, it was as good a place as any, until she decided what she was going to do when she grew up.

Now, why had she thought that?

"Touchdown in six minutes," came the voice of the attendant over the com. "Please engage your form-units to landing mode."

Dirisha reached for the controls of her seat, trying to put the thoughts she'd been having out of her mind.

The main spaceport for the hemisphere was on an artificial island twenty kilometers from shore a precaution taken on a number of worlds she'd visited in case the forerunners to modern boxcars, the rocket shuttles, decided to explode on impact. Apparently such things had been common in days past.

It was summer in (he latitudes containing Simplex-by-the-Sea, and it was hot. Even the breeze generated by the speed of the ferry did little more than rearrange the sweat drenching Dirisha. The ferry was old and it shuddered and vibrated as it rode its uneven cushion of air across the tropical water. Dirisha stood on the forward deck, feeling the sun and air working on her tightly curled hair. Her droptacts polarized automatically and cut a lot of the glare, but it was still very bright. Just like home.

Ahead lay the village she was travelling to, a coastal burg set around the perimeter of a bay girded with fishing vessels. The boats wore strange rigging, wide V-shaped poles strung with mesh must be nets.

There were a number of small sailing craft leaning back and forth, crisscrossing the bay. One of them, a tiny boat of maybe eight or ten meters, seemed to be having trouble aiming itself. The sailors were putting the boat directly into the path of the ferry. As the two vessels neared, Dirisha saw three people on the smaller boat, frantically pulling on ropes and gesturing wildly.

The air was rent by the ferry's warning hom, a deep, dinosaur-like blast.

The sailboat seemed to stall at the sound. It was directly ahead of the masive ferry and if it didn't move soon, it would be run down.

The sound of the ferry's engines changed, and Dirisha felt a slight tug as the big craft began to turn slightly to starboard. The dinosaur bellowed again, more insistently, but the smaller boat didn't seem to be able to move. Dirisha calculated the angle between the sailboat and the ferry and it looked to be critical for the sailors. The ferry was turning, but ponderously, and the three on the sailboat must know how precarious their position was.

They weren't going to make it, Dirisha saw. She stepped toward the metal railing at the deck's end and gripped it tightly, leaning over to stare at the sailboat.

With perhaps fifty meters left before impact, the sailboat suddenly seemed to lurch to one side; it would still be close