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

in a series of lovers with clever hands and a persuasively insincere line. Men
I didn't have to take seriously. I came up hard against the most important
lesson I'd learned from Tony: good old homo sap is nothing but a gob of
complicated slime. I was slime doing a slimy job and trying to run fast enough
that I wouldn't have to smell my own stink. I was sorry now that I hadn't
asked Bonivard for some flash to poke.
_Thwocka-thwock_. "This way, please." One of the wiseguys shot past me
down the hallway.
I followed. "Which one are you?"
"He calls me Ego." It paused for a beat. "I am a Datex R5000, modified
to develop sentience. Your room." It bounced through an open door. "This is
the Bemese Chamber. Note the decorative patterns of interlacing ribbons,
flowers, and birds, which date..."
"Out," I said, and shut the door behind it.
As soon as I sat on the musty bed, I realized I couldn't face spending
the night alone. Doing nothing. I had to keep running and there was only one
way to go now. I'd had enough. I was going to wrap the story, finished or not.
The thought cheered me immensely. I wouldn't have to care what happened to
Django and Bonivard, wouldn't have to wonder about WILDLIFE. All I had to do
was burst a message to Infoline. Supposedly I still had the snatch from
Orbital 7 and the aftermath of the crash stored on the goggles' memory dots,
story enough for Jerry Macmillan. He'd send some muscle to take me out of here
and then maybe I'd spend a few months at Infoline's sanctuary in Montana
watching clouds. Anyway, I'd be done with it. I took the system unit off my
belt and began to rig its collapsible antenna. I locked onto the satellite and
then wrote the message. "HOTEL BRISTOL VEYTAUX 6/18 0200 GMT PIX COGNICO
WING." I had seen the Bristol on the walk in. I loaded the message into the
burster. There was a pause for compression and encryption and then it hit the
Infoline satellite with a millisecond burst.
And then beeped at me. Incoming message. I froze. There was no way
Infoline could respond that quickly, no way they were supposed to respond. It
had to be prerecorded. Which meant trouble.
Jerry Macmillan's face filled the burster's four-centimeter screen. He
looked as scared as I felt. "Big problems, Wynne," he said. "Seems whatever
your snakes snatched is some kind of weapons system, way too hot for us to
handle. It's not just Cognico; the EU and the feds are squeezing the newsnets
so hard our eyes are popping out. They haven't connected you to us yet. Maybe
they won't. But if they do, we've got to cooperate. The DoD claims it's a
matter of national security. You're on your own."
I put my thumb over his face. I would have pushed it through the back
of his skull if I could have.
"The best I can do for you is to delete your takeout message and the
fix the satellite gets on your burster. It might mean my ass, but I owe you
something. I know this stinks on ice, kid. Good luck."
I took my thumb away from the screen. It was blank. I choked back a
scream and hurled the burster against the stone wall of Chillon.
****
Sleep? It would have been easier to slit my throat than to sleep that
night. I thought about it -- killing myself. I thought about everything at
least once. All my calculations kept adding up to zero. I could turn myself in