"Keith Laumer - Bolos 8 - Bolo Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

Not yet. There has to be a way....

His hands slid an ooze of slick mud aside, and he reeled back on his haunches as a fetid stench
broke the surface. "Uh oh," he said. "We got one here."

Wal moved closer, reaching in to help. The foul death-stink grew sharper, sweeter, and more eye-
watering as they exposed the body, or what was left of it, lying in the wet muck next to a
toppled, squared-off pillar from a shattered building.

After almost a T-standard year in the flooded grounds behind Celeste's waterfront, the body had
been reduced to little more than a skeleton, with wet-paper skin still molded to the face and some
of the longer, flatter bones, and colorless hair still clinging to the skull. It lay on its back,
skull turned to one side, the fingers of the right hand crammed between gaping jaws, as though in
a deliberate and desperate attempt to stifle a dying scream. From the length of the remaining
hair, and the rags of cloth still clinging to the ribcage, Jaime guessed that it had been a woman.
Only the top half of her body was accessible; the spool-train of her lower vertebrae vanished
beneath the fallen pillar, and her pelvis and legs were hidden somewhere beneath the multiton
block of stone.

No matter. Her organic parts could no longer be harvested in any case, and there was plenty of
pure metal here, within easy reach. A gold ring encrusted with tiny gems still encircled the
fourth finger of her left hand, a fingerwatch the fifth. A black-stained necklace of flattened
chain links that might be gold but were probably gold-plate circled her neck. A pin of some kind,
an ornament of some heavy, silvery metal worked into a lozenge shape centered by an exquisite,
emerald-cut heliodore, lay on her ribs above what had been her left breast. Stardrop pendants next
to the skull had probably been earrings.

Working swiftly, he plucked each article of jewelry from the bones and transferred them all to
Wal's bag. The necklace clasp had corroded into an unworkable lump of oxide, so he had to work the
skull free from the vertebrae to get at it. With the skull free in his hand, he checked the teeth
for gold or gemstones. Gold dental fillings were a curiosity of the remote Dark Ages, of course, a
medico-historical footnote, but some Ckmdwellers had affected gold or silver teeth as cosmetic
statements. This nameless woman, though, still had all of her original teeth, and no body
prosthetics. There were some tiny catches and hooks here and there, however, that might have been
part of her clothing. Each of these was carefully rescued from the muck and placed in the bag.

And through it all, Jaime carefully ignored the stink, ignored the emotions welling up in his
throat as he stripped the skeleton of every scrap of metal he could find, and somehow buried the
very thought of what he was doing far beneath the reach of his conscious mind. He knew from long
experience that it simply didn't pay to dwell too much on what the Masters forced him to do each
day.

"That's it," he said at last, the thing done. He wiped at his beard and mouth with the back of his
arm, then pointed. "Let's move up that way."

They continued their sweep of the plaza, moving past the toppled pillar, inching along on hands
and knees, feeling through the mud for any recyclable materialsтАФpure metals, especially, but also
gemstones, plastics, and even shards of ceramic or glass. The !.!.! used it all, forcing their
human slaves to salvage every scrap. Around Jaime and Wal, filling the entire, stadium-sized pit,