"Steve Perry - Matador 00 - The 97th Step" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Scanned by Highroller and proofed more or less by Highroller.

Part One

The Seeker Asleep

Since love and fear can hardly exist together, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

-MACHIAVELLI

THE SLAVER WAS about to buy trouble, though he didn't know it yet.

It was a spacers' pub, set in the run-down port section of Chüsai Tomadachi, the wheelworld that
orbited the planet Tomadachi, in the Shin System. The stale air was thick with flick-stick smoke and its
smell of burned cashews, and the lighting was cycled to dim, giving enough illumination to see but hiding
the shabbiness of the painted and scratched aluminum walls. The place thrummed with an undercurrent of
tough talk and menace, but it was outlaw swagger, and not the force-backed brute power of the
Confed—the upper castes would hardly demean themselves by coming to a scum hole like this for
recreation.

At a small expanded-aluminum mesh table against one wall, two men sat drinking ale. Ashanti Khahil
Stoll was a big man, pushing two meters, sheathed overall in a thick layer of fat. He wore a plain gray
orthoskin coverall that struggled to contain his bulk, and he looked relatively harmless compared to many
of the men and mues in the pub.

His companion, also dressed in plain gray orthoskins, was something else. He was called Ferret, and he
had a cold look about him that seemed anything but harmless. In his early thirties, he was perhaps three
decades younger than Stoll. Ferret viewed the scene through hard green eyes, and while his face and
hands were pale, neither looked soft. In a room full of dangerous men, these two were harder than most,
and those who knew the biz but didn't know Ferret and Stoll stayed away from their table. Mean dogs
know how to avoid meaner ones.

Near the exit, the slaver stood glaring at his thrall.

Ferret stared at the slaver, then sipped at his ale. Slavery was illegal, of course, but none of the pub's
patrons was apt to worry about law, save how best to break it and profit. Were the local cools or the
Confed military to implode-bomb this place, the serious crime rate for five light-years would drop
dramatically. Ferret was merely a thief and smuggler like his friend Stoll, but there were others, who dealt
in worse crimes. Some who made slavers look like saints, dark dancers on the fringe of the fringe.

The slaver's voice rose as he used it to cut at the thin boy who stood with his head bowed under the
abuse.

Over the years, Ferret had learned to mind his own business, sometimes the hard way, and this was none
of it.

None of his business at all, until the strap appeared.

The slaver, a bulky human mue with the look of a heavy-gravity childhood, produced the strap from a
belt pouch. It looked like hebi-skin in the dim light, soft and pliable, but pebbled and rough like shark or