"Doris Piserchia - Star Rider" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piserchia Doris)

grinning.
I settled back, let my feet dangle at his sides and began picking my
teeth with the straw I always carried behind my ear. “Hunters all over the
place. Hitch a ride any time I want, Of course, if that happens, I get myself
another mount. If you can’t trust a mount, you might as well commit
suicide. Damn things go loco once in a while and then it’s the pasture for
them.”
“Do that to me and I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Kind of tired of you. A lifetime of your bellyaching has been enough to
make me gag. What’s the matter with you?”
“Told you I was hungry.”
“We ate a while ago. You forget that planet we stopped at?”
“Not that kind of hunger.”
I leaned on his neck and scowled. In some ways, Hinx had more jink
than I. Usually, a half-grown mount was frisky and dumb as a rock, but
Hinx was a serious thinker and could jink things far away.
When you jinked, you got a thing up close and swarmed all over it with
your mind. You didn’t go after it to look it over; you dragged it close and
pawed it up one side and down the other. Naturally, you didn’t pull the
actual thing to you, just an aura of its essence.
“We’re nowhere near anything interesting,” I said. “What the heck can
you be jinking?”
He sat so far back on his rump that my own backside almost touched
the ground. “Don’t know. A powerful hunger’s building in me.”
“Wish you’d quit dumping us in D so fast.” I spoke neither too gently
nor too harshly. He was a good mount and there was love between us. I
didn’t know it then but the clawing longing I’d had a minute ago had
gotten under his hide. He didn’t know it, either. Time, place,
circumstance; those were all it took to make a miracle, or a hell of a mess.
Anyhow, I sat there and he sat there and suddenly the odd tilt of his
shaggy head made me feel creepy. I said, “One of these days I’ll be slow
getting my shield tight around me and the danged vacuum on one of these
rocks’ll pinch my whistle permanently.”
The nose of Hinx quivered. Straight up it jutted. Howl? Enough to give
me the shudders.
“I gotta go, love,” he said, and I automatically gripped him tight. Bang,
D-2. That space-busting maniac under my seat took me like a babe and I
made up my mind to have him psyched if I ever got the chance. He needed
his brains cleaned out, needed to be put to pasturing and pleasuring on
one of those resort planets for blown mounts.
“Whoa.” I said, but he paid me no mind. “Damned nag,” I swore, and
with good reason. He was climbing a string of asteroids as if they were a
pile of rocks. My guts jiggled and my brains rattled as I hung on and
cussed him to galaxy’s end and back. Bang, D-3, with his feet on an
asteroid. Bang, D-2, with the wind of nothing in my ears and the black of
perdition tearing at my throat. Bang, D-3, with his feet reaching for that
little piece of ground ahead, and the son of a clumsy bitch slipped and
threw us into D-2 so fast I thought I was a goner.
He finally hit one of those rocks solid, but did he stop and apologize to
me, who hung onto his mangy fur for dear life? He did not, just tippytoed