Steve Perry - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage

VIP免费

2024-11-29 0 0 458.38KB 280 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Perry,Steve - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage (v1.0) (html).html

Scanned by Highroller.

Proofed by salx.

Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet.

The Omega Cage by Steve

Perry and Michael Reaves

Part One

The vilest deeds like poison weeds bloom well in prison air; It is only what is

good in man that wastes and withers there; Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate

and the Warder is despair.

—Oscar Wilde,

"The Ballad of Reading Gaol"

Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage…

—Richard Lovelace,

Lucasta. To Althea: From Prison

Chapter One

The skimmer hit a hard downdraft and fell several hundred meters almost

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...ry%20-%20Matador%204%20-%20The%20Omega%20Cage.html (1 of 280)23-2-2006 17:43:06

Perry,Steve - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage (v1.0) (html).html

instantly. Dain Maro felt the free-fall flutter in his belly as the little ship

dropped. There was no danger; they were still far above the ground, but the

suddenness of it nearly lifted him from his form-seat.

The manacles stopped him.

He was chained to the seat, wrists and ankles, and it would have taken a lot more

than a little air turbulence to break him free. He looked at the gyves. They could

have used ataractic drugs or pressor fields to hold him, but Omega was a frontier

world, and the Confed didn't waste its technology on criminals. The manacles

were molecular-stacked graphites, twice as hard as polycarb durosteel, and the

process for making them was a hundred years old. Ancient, maybe, but certainly

effective enough.

Maro looked up at the mirrored window next to his seat. The face that stared

back at him certainly didn't look dangerous enough to be sent to Omega. The

reflected image had dark hair, not quite black, and sharp features—a thin nose

and lips, pale blue eyes, and a strong chin—or so he had been told, mostly by

women.

"Whatcha lookin' at, pretty boy?" Pig said.

Maro didn't bother to turn; he could see the guard's image in the mirror behind

him. He had mentally dubbed the two guards Snake and Pig, for their most

outstanding features. Snake was a whippet-thin man of maybe forty T.S., with

some kind of skin disease that made him both shiny and scaly; either that, or

maybe he was from one of the worlds where the bandit bioshifters still operated.

Or perhaps the condition was some kind of protective adaptation. Pig's face was

dominated by his nostrils, set in a nose that looked as if it had met too many

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...ry%20-%20Matador%204%20-%20The%20Omega%20Cage.html (2 of 280)23-2-2006 17:43:06

Perry,Steve - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage (v1.0) (html).html

walls at too high a rate of speed.

The two grinned unpleasantly at each other. "Why don't we show him the

place?" Snake said.

"Yeah. You want to see your new home, pretty boy?"

Maro continued to stare at his reflection. He said nothing. The two guards were

sadists, and he'd found the safest course was to ignore them as much as possible.

Pig touched his throat mike. "Take us down for the tour, Rouge. Pretty boy, he's

curious."

The skimmer began a fairly rapid descent. Maro turned away from the window

and stared straight ahead. He didn't want to play whatever game these creeps

were running. He suspected, however, that he didn't have much of a choice.

To Maro's left, Snake stroked a pressure-sensitive control on the latter's chair.

The window's photo optometrics kicked on and the thincris plate next to Maro

washed clear. Maro didn't want to look, but he knew if he were ever going to

escape from the Cage, he'd need all the information he could get. He turned

toward the viewport.

They were skimming perhaps a hundred meters above a swamp. Thick-boled

trees rose from dank, green water; the few patches of solid ground were covered

with brush, most of it in shades of mottled green, with occasional bursts of color;

flowers, birds, other animals he didn't recognize.

Some sort of animal, like an elephant with a short nose and lots of teeth, roared

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...ry%20-%20Matador%204%20-%20The%20Omega%20Cage.html (3 of 280)23-2-2006 17:43:06

Perry,Steve - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage (v1.0) (html).html

up soundlessly at them.

All in all, Maro thought, it was not the most hospitable place he had ever seen.

He estimated their speed at around five hundred klicks, based on his own

experience flying low-level atmospheric craft. At that rate, the swamp went on

for a damned long way before it gave way to dry land. But when the change in

terrain finally occurred, Maro's jaw dropped—the land was desert, with only a

few scrubby bushes dotting wind-patterned sand dunes. What kind of ecology

would allow desert next to swamp that way? It didn't make any sense. It

shouldn't exist.

Pig laughed, a grunting sound. "You like that? The whole fucking planet is that

way, pretty boy. Nobody has ever escaped from the Cage, but if they did, they'd

be dead fast. Everything down there would just as soon kill you as look at you.

You got a one-way ticket to hell."

Maro leaned back in his seat, still not speaking. The thincris shimmered and

darkened a little, filtering out the hot sunshine but staying clear enough for him

to see the surface below.

Snake said, "Pretty boy like you's gonna get eaten up by the scum in the Cage,

you copy? But I might put in a good word for you with some of the guards, make

it easier on you—if you want to be nice to me."

The last was said in a suggestive tone. Maro turned to stare at Pig. The guard

dropped one fat hand to his crotch and massaged himself through the gray

thinskin uniform. He leered at Maro, and the effect was so comical that the

prisoner almost laughed. He knew he should keep his mouth shut, should just let

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...ry%20-%20Matador%204%20-%20The%20Omega%20Cage.html (4 of 280)23-2-2006 17:43:06

Perry,Steve - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage (v1.0) (html).html

it pass like all of Pig's other crude attempts—but he couldn't resist.

"I'd rather sleep with a genitonecrotic dog," Maro said.

The leer vanished, and Pig stood, doubling his fists.

Way to go, Dain, Maro told himself wearily. Now you get your ass kicked for

letting your mouth fly. Just like usual…

There were six of them, Stark knew. He also knew precisely where they planned

to hop the wall, and he was ready for them. It had been a while since he'd

tendered an object lesson, and it never hurt to remind the scum what happened to

those who got itchy feet. It wasn't any particular joy to him; he had come from

the military, and slaughter wasn't his style. But the rules had to be made clear.

No exceptions.

He thumbed his throat mike. "You see them, doppler?"

The simadam running the scope replied, "Copy, Warden. Six for six,

approaching stanchion four, two hundred and six meters out."

Stark nodded. "Good," he said. "Heat up the lasers."

There was a brief pause, then the simadam said, "Uh, wouldn't the focused

sonics work just as well? And they'd be alive—"

"The lasers, I said. Full spec, full rake, full pattern."

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20krui...ry%20-%20Matador%204%20-%20The%20Omega%20Cage.html (5 of 280)23-2-2006 17:43:06

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Perry,Steve-Matador4-TheOmegaCage(v1.0)(html).htmlScannedbyHighroller.Proofedbysalx.MadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.TheOmegaCagebyStevePerryandMichaelReavesPartOneThevilestdeedslikepoisonweedsbloomwellinprisonair;Itisonly\whatisgoodinmanthatwastesandwithersthere;PaleAnguishkeepstheheav...

展开>> 收起<<

Steve Perry - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage.pdf

共280页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Steve Perry - Matador 4 - The Omega Cage

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: