"Baker, Kage - Company 4 The Graveyard Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

Look, we've got all night: and you're not going anywhere. I'll tell you about it.


Hollywood, 1996

Something odd had happened.
Unless you possessed the temporally keen senses of an immortal cyborg, though, you wouldn't have noticed, over all the racket floating up from the roaring, grinding city. Lewis, being an immortal cyborg, frowned slightly as he accelerated up Mount Olympus Drive and scanned the thick air. He was a dapper man, with the appearance of someone who has wandered out of a Noel Coward play and got lost in a less gracious place.
Earthquake? No, or there would have been car alarms shrieking and people standing out on the sidewalk, a place the inhabitants of Los Angeles County seldom ventured nowadays without body armor.
Still, there was a sense of insult on the fabric of space and time, a residual shuddering Lewis couldn't identify at all.
He turned left into Zeus Drive and nosed his jade-green BMW into the driveway of the house. Nothing out of the ordinary here that he could see. He shut off the engine, removed his polarized sunglasses and put them in their case, removed his studio parking tag, and carefully put glasses and tag in the glove compartment. Only then did he emerge from the car and look about, sniffing the air.
Other than a higher than normal amount of ozone and an inexplicable whiff of horse, the air wasn't any worse than usual. Lewis shrugged, took up his briefcase, locked the car, and entered Company HQ.
What was that high-pitched whine? Lewis set down his briefcase, tossed his keys on the hall table, and looked into what would have been an ordinary suburban living room if it hadn't had a time transcendence chamber in one wall. Maire, the station's Facilitator, was activating it. She turned to him.
"You should have been here, Lewis. We've had quite an afternoon," she said.
He barely heard her, his gaze drawn to the window of the chamber. He gaped, astonished to see a pair of very uneasy horses and two oddly dressed people in there, just beginning to be obscured by the rising stasis gas.
One of the people raised her hand and waved. She was a sharp-featured woman, with cold black eyes and hair bound back in a long braid. She smiled at him. He knew the smile. It made her eyes less cold. The woman was the Botanist Mendoza.
Lewis had loved her, quietly, for several centuries, and she had never once noticed. They were stationed at the same research base for many years before she was transferred. He thought of writing to her after that, but then lost his chance, because she made a terrible mistake.
So terrible, in fact, that it was impossible that she could be standing there now smiling at him.
Then he connected the horses with the nineteenth-century clothing she was wearing. Was he seeing her, somehow, before the commission of her mistake? Was there any chance he might warn her, prevent the catastrophe?
No, because you couldn't violate the laws of temporal physics. You couldn't change history. He knew that perfectly well and yet found himself running to the chamber as the gas boiled up around her, beating on the window with his fists.
"Mendoza!" he shouted. "Mendoza, for God's sake! Don't go with him!"
She stared, taken aback, and then turned her wondering face to her companion. Lewis realized she thought he meant the other immortal, and cried, "No!"
She looked back at him and shook her head, shrugging.
"No, no!" Lewis shouted, and he could feel tears welling in his eyes as he pressed his hands against the glass, to push across time by main force. Futile. She was vanishing from his sight even now, as the yellow gas obscured everything.
Out of the clouds, her hand emerged for a moment. She set it against the window, palm to palm with his flattened hand, a gesture he would have died for once, rendered less personal by the thickness of the glass.
Then she was gone, he had lost her again, and he staggered back from the chamber and became aware that Maire was standing beside him. He turned and looked into her amazed eyes, struggled to compose himself.
"ErЧwhat's going on?" he inquired, in the coolest voice he could summon.
"You tell me!" was Maire's reply.
In the end, though, she had to explain first. What he had seen was a temporal anomalyЧnothing the Company couldn't handle. In fact Maire had received advance warning this morning from Future HQ. It was all listed in the Temporal Concordance. Everyone knew that weird things happened at the Mount Olympus HQ anyway, overlooking as it did Laurel Canyon's notorious Lookout Mountain Drive. It had been built to monitor that very location, actually.
This didn't do a lot to clear up Lewis's confusion. Temporal Concordance or not, it was still supposed to be impossible for anybody in the past to jump forward through time. When he mentioned this, Maire glanced at the techs and drew him aside.
"She was your friend, wasn't she?"
"Yes," said Lewis. "AЧa coworker. We were close."
Maire said in a low voice:
"Then you knew she was a Crome generator."
Lewis hadn't known. He was unable to hide his shock. Watching his face go pale, Maire lowered her voice even more.
"Lewis, I'm sorry. I'm afraid it's true. Something latent that wasn't caught when she was recruited, apparently. You know what those people are; she might have warped the field any one of a dozen ways. What can I tell you? The impossible happens, sometimes."
He nodded, silent. Maire looked him up and down and pursed her lips.
"Under the circumstances, you see why there wasn't anything you could have done to help her," she said, in a tone that was gentle but suggested he'd better get a grip on himself now.
Lewis gulped and nodded.
Nothing more was said that night, and he thought the matter would slip by without further discussion. But next morning at breakfast, Maire said, "You're still upset. I can tell."
"I guess I made a fool of myself," Lewis replied, sipping his coffee. "She was a good friend."
"I wouldn't worry about it, Lewis," she told him, stirring sugar into her cup. The tech who was on his hands and knees scrubbing a large stain off the carpet looked up to glare at her. She glared back and slowly lifted her coffee, drinking it in elaborate enjoyment. "I might have done the same thing in your shoes. Besides, you're a valued Company operative."
"That's nice to know," said Lewis mildly, but he felt the hair stand on the back of his neck. He modified the slight tremor into a sad shake of his head. "Poor Mendoza. But, after all, a Crome generator! At least the rumors make sense now."
"Yes," Maire agreed. "Cream?"
"Thank you." Lewis held out his cup. The tech made a disgusted noise. He was a relatively young immortal, having traveled to 1996 from the year 2332. and not liking the past at all. He didn't care for decadent old immortals who indulged in disgusting controlled-substance abuse either. Coffee, cream, and chocolate were all illegal in his era. More: they were immoral.
"Unfortunate, but the sooner we put it behind us the better," Maire continued. She rose and wandered over to the picture window, which looked out across Laurel Canyon. It was a hazy morning in midsummer, with the sky a delicate yellow shading to blue at the zenith. The yellow was from internal combustion engines. The air burned, acrid on one's palate, and was full of the wailing of sirens and the thudding beat of helicopter blades. Maire was fifteen thousand years old, but the late twentieth century didn't bother her much; she'd seen worse. Besides, this was Hollywood.
Behind her, Lewis drained his coffee and set down his saucer and cup. "Sound advice," he said. "Well, I'd better hit the road. I'm going up to San Francisco today. That fellow with the Marion Davies correspondence has settled on a price at last."
"No, really?" Maire grinned. "I suppose you'll pay a little visit to . . ." She dropped her eyes to the tech, who was still scrubbing away, and looked back up at Lewis. Ghirardelli's? she transmitted on a private channel.
Lewis stood and took her hand. Shall I bring you back a box of little Theobromos cable cars? he transmitted back.
Her smile widened, showing a lot of beautiful and very white teeth. She squeezed his hand. She was a strong woman. You're a dear.
"To Fisherman's Wharf? Certainly. Shall I bring you back a loaf of sourdough bread?" Lewis asked.