"James Patrick Kelly - The Prisoner of Chillon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

======================
The Prisoner of Chillon
by James Patrick Kelly
======================

Copyright (c)1986 by James Patrick Kelly
First published in Asimov's, June 1986

Fictionwise
www.Fictionwise.com

Science Fiction
Asimov's Reader's Choice Winner, Locus Poll Award Nominee

---------------------------------
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original
purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk,
network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international
copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment.
---------------------------------


We initiated deorbital burn over the Marshall Islands and dropped back
into the ionosphere, locked by the wing's navigator into one of the Eurospace
reentry corridors. As we coasted across Central America we were an easy target
for the attack satellites. The plan was to fool the tracking nets into
thinking we were a corporate shuttle. Django had somehow acquired the
recognition codes; his computer, snaked to the wing's navigator, had convinced
it to pretend to be the property of Erno Raumfahrttechnik GMBH, the EU
aerospace conglomerate.
It was all a matter of timing, really. It would not be too much longer
before the people on Cognico's Orbital 7 untangled the spaghetti Django had
made of their memory systems and realized that he had downloaded WILDLIFE and
stolen a cargo wing. Then they would have to decide whether to zap us
immediately or have their own private security ops waiting when we landed. The
plan was to lose the wing before they could decide. Our problem was that very
little of the plan had worked so far.
Django had gotten us on and off the orbital research station all right,
and had managed to pry WILDLIFE from the jaws of the corporate beast. For that
alone his reputation would live forever among the snakes who steal information
for a living, even if he was not around to enjoy the fame. But he had lost our
pilot, Yellowbaby -- his partner, my sometime lover -- and neither of us had
any idea exactly what it was he had stolen. He seemed pretty calm for somebody
who had just sunk fangs into the world's biggest computer company. He slouched
in the commander's seat across from me, watching the readouts on the autopilot
console. He was smiling and tapping a finger against his headset as if he were
listening to one of his jazz disks. He was a dark, ugly man with an Adam's
apple that looked like a nose and a nose that looked like an elbow. He had
either been to the face cutters or he was in his mid-thirties. I trusted him
not at all and liked him less.