"Nancy Kress - Borovsky's Hollow Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

the beams from which it hung.
The steam was beginning to clear as the third support gave way. Borovsky saw the pod pitch crazily

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downward on its last thin support and describe a short, fast pendulum arc for several seconds. Then
weight and metal fatigue ripped the support from its bracket. The pod tumbled downward toward the
stars with sickening speed, trailing a tattered comet's tall of steam.
The steam was gone, falling away from them as the pod had. Borovsky gritted his teeth, breathing
shallowly. Laura saw Coyne under the big glass bubble atop the ELM, watching the pod vanish in the
glare from the sun.
With infinite care Borovsky pulled a zot wrench from his hip. The ELM was several meters spinward
of the nest of beams to which they clung. Laura knew Borovsky was watching Coyne as desperately as
she was. But what could Borovsky do?
Coyne turned his eyes away from the now-vanished pod and began looking ahead. Laura and
Borovsky were still in shadow, through the sun was creeping spinward along the tessellated
undersurface of Eastman Nexus. In ten minutes light would find them - as would Coyne.
Coyne could not have seen them blow out of the pod amidst the steam, but he was not stupid enough
to assume it could not be done. Laura imagined that he would expect them to flee along the beams, and
she watched his narrow face searching the impenetrable shadows antispinward of where they hid.
Borovsky seemed to share her speculations. His arm cocked, and with a quick, sure motion he threw
the zot wrench to antispinward. Five meters beyond them it fell out of the shadows and caught the sun
with a metallic dazzle.
Coyne saw the wrench. The ELM's motors ground to life again, pulling the big egg antispinward.
Coyne brought up the big spotlight and began scanning the shadows only a meter beyond them.
The ELM crept beneath them. Its upraised robotic arm carried the glittering diamond wheel not a
meter from Laura's helmet. Borovsky's body tensed inside Laura. She knew, horrified, what he was
about to do.
As soon as the ELM's dome passed beyond them, Borovsky and Laura dropped from the beam, down
onto the back of the handling machine.
Magnets in Laura's toes and knees snapped hold on the metal as they connected. Laura saw Coyne
turn and open his mouth; she felt his scream through the metal of the ELM.
Borovsky crouched down and backward. The multijointed arm swung toward them, holding its
silently spinning cutoff wheel. The wheel scanned back and forth as Coyne's hands flexed in the
pantograph. As Borovsky had known, its joints would not allow it to reach that far back over the ELM's
dome.
Laura felt machinery energize beneath her. Four smaller arms were unfolding from the sides of the
ELM. Each carried something deadly - an arc welder, cable nips, tubing cutter, and utility grippers.
The arc welder struck and sizzled into life. It had the shortest range and could not reach them; Coyne
let it drop after one pass. The tubing cutter lunged at Laura's arm and ground against the hardened steel
of one of the slender hydraulic cylinders that moved her torso. Borovsky grabbed at the cutter below its
wrist and twisted hard. The bayonet latches obediently opened, and the tool popped from the end of the
arm, leaving the blunt wrist to flail and beat at them. While Coyne was distracted, Borovsky kicked out
at the base of the arm carrying the cable nips. With Laura's hydraulic assist in full play, the kick bent the
arm back hard against its base. Fluid oozed from the base joint and ran greasily down the ELM's side.
The arm twitched several times and was still.
The remaining arm hovered cautiously just out of reach, weaving from side to side like an attacking
snake. It carried a hand with four powerful fingers and, unlike the others, the hand was too complex to