"Richard Kadrey - Metrophage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kadrey Richard)

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Richard Kadrey: Metrophage



METROPHAGE
by Richard Kadrey


Now I lay me down to sleep
I hear the sirens in the street
All my dreams are made of chrome
I have no way to get back home
--Tom Waits



ONE:
The Petrified City

A crip by the name of Easy Money ran the HoloWhores down at
a place called Carnaby's Pit. At least he had been running them the
last time Jonny Qabbala, drug dealer, ex-Committee for Public Health
bounty hunter, and self-confessed loser, had paid him a visit. Jonny
was hoping that Easy was still working the Pit. He had a present for
him from a dead friend.
The ugly and untimely murder of Raquin, the chemist, had left
an empty spot in the pit of Jonny's stomach. Not just because Raquin
had been Jonny's connection (since it was a simple matter for Jonny
to get his dope directly from Raquin's boss, the smuggler lord
Conover) but over the year or so of their acquaintance Raquin had
become, to Jonny, something close to a friend. And close to a friend"
was as much as Jonny generally allowed himself to become. It was
fear of loss more than any lack of feelings on his part that kept Jonny
at a distance from most of the other losers and one-percenters that
crowded Los Angeles.
Overhead, the moon was a bone-white sickle. Jonny wondered,
idly, if the Alpha Rats were watching Los Angeles that night. What
would the extraterrestrials think, through a quarter million miles of
empty space, when they saw him put a bullet through Easy Money's
head?

Jonny caught sight of Carnaby's Pit a few blocks away, quartz
prisms projecting captured atrocity videos from the Lunar Border
Wars. On a flat expanse of wall above the club's entrance, a New
Palestine soldier in a vacuum suit was smashing the faceplate of a
Mishima Guardsman. The Guardsman's blood bubbled from his
helmet, droplets boiling to hard black jewels as the soundtrack from