Deadstock

Начало книги

There were neighborhoods in the city of Paxton where the police did not readily go-if at all. Tin Town, for instance, or Warehouse Way; the former given over mostly to mutants and the latter to squatters in its nominal disused warehouses. Sometimes fires in such regions were even left to burn themselves out, despite the fact that the city firefighting units were mostly automated in nature.

Beaumonde Square, however, was not one of these shunned sectors of Punktown, as the megalopolis had come to be known over the years since Earth colonists had built it upon the humble foundation of the native Choom city that preceded it, like a great cathedral atop an ancient pagan altar.

No, Beaumonde Square was one of the more affluent areas of the city. In its environs were Paxton University and the Beaumonde Women's College. There were plazas and narrow streets either retaining the cobblestones of the original Choom lanes, or replicating that quaint effect. Neatly spaced trees fronted rows of upscale shops, as did stone benches upon which to sip one's cappuccino. There was Quidd's Market, with its countless booths offering food from a cross-section of Punktown's many sentient species, human in aspect or otherwise. The mall-like structure's central rotunda was meant to represent this planet Oasis, raised in an invitation to the first colonists, and to lure them to the market to do business. Money had paved the streets of Beaumonde Square as surely as its cobblestones, from the start.

Читать дальше →