"Bad Asteroid Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martinez Steve)

УMaybe, but the captain is still going to kill you.Ф
УNo, IТll be too useful as a hate object. It will unify the crew, and show everyone he was right about me all along. DonТt worry about him. He loves a good emergency, now and then. And you have your private time.Ф
УAnd you have your revenge. On everybody.Ф She shook her head. УSheesh, I canТt believe it. You must be a little bit crazy.Ф
УYouТre quite welcome. ItТs the least I could do after barging in the way I did. IТll go now, and let you enjoy your solitude.Ф
УYou donТt have to go. I always spout off. It doesnТt mean anything. Sit down. You had something on your mind. What was it?Ф
УIt can wait.Ф He went to the door and then turned. УI was just wondering, as you examine the robots for signs of what took place, have you noticed a certain agitation among them?Ф
УAgitation?Ф
УItТs hard to describe. Normally the human presence among them is part of the background of their awareness, like the weather. But since we arrived, they seem almost skittish. IТve been trying to get them adjusted to their new circumstances, and they overshoot the mark trying to anticipate my intentions. Instead of pushing them along IТve got to hold them back. Maybe their thought processes have simply evolved in the time they were left alone, or perhaps the pirates somehow disturbed their collective psyche.Ф
УReally?Ф
УOh, yes. They do have a psyche, you know. Let me know if I can be of assistance.Ф
Trina was in shock for a little while. Then it began to sink in that she had some time to work with, and no reason to feel guilty about it. It wasnТt her fault. And once sheТd gotten used to that fact, she found that she was indeed onto something with those pieces of Willie 1-9Тs mind. It was like finding fragments of something that had once been alive, except that these fragments did not belong to the world of material things. They were little nothings in themselves, pieces of wanting-to-assemble, but what they wanted to assemble depended on what pattern, in turn, assembled them.
One of her first tasks was to put the code fragments into an intelligible form by setting up some virtual robots based on Willie 1-9Тs general pattern, and watching how the fragments affected him in simulations. At a low level, there wasnТt much to set him apartЧhe had all the basic moves. At a higher level, there were skills, some mundane, like walking, others more specialized, and among them some potential oddballs.
At a higher level still were some vague intimations of how Willie fit into the grand plan. That was where the discrepancies between Willie 1-9 and the others were most apparent, though at first it wasnТt clear what it meant. Gradually, by trying out one context after another, varying the raw materials, cloning multiple virtual Willies to be his coworkers, a pattern began to emerge. It was not at all what she had expected. There was nothing so clear-cut as a memory of having been visited.
But there was evidence of design elements in the skill bank that had no place in their normal repertoire. The robots had apparently been busy for a long time on a task she was beginning to vaguely sketch out. There were indications that the Willies had been making large superconducting electromagnets of a type used in mass drivers. With a little more digging, she might even come up with the operational parameters. Ingenious! The pirates had no need to risk a landingЧthey had just instructed the robots to construct a mass driver and shoot material off to some rendezvous point. Except for one robot who fell down a crack, there would have been no trace left behind.
She was up on her feet from the excitement, and dying to tell someone. She wondered how they might reconstruct the exact timing and trajectory of the material. Maybe from the record of adjustments to the uplink antenna they could see how the asteroidТs orbit had changed. Pacing the room soon became striding down the hallway full of a sudden sympathy for her stranded comrades. This charade had gone on long enough, time to call it off.
The echoes of her footsteps seemed to have echoes of their own. She stopped, and the footsteps continued. She called out, but there was no answer. Then she heard the airlock cycleЧthe noise was coming from the floor below. She slid down the nearest ladder. But there was no one there. A few empty vacuum suits hung limp and faceless. The external view showed nothing, just the black-against-black of night on an asteroid. But if Rakshasa had gone out, why hadnТt he turned on the floods?
She took out her datapad and called up the locator. Rakshasa was out there all right, and being sneaky about it. She felt like an idiot for thinking heТd set off that alarm for her sake. He was up to something.
Or he could be perfectly innocent. Just out for a walk. It was his element, after all. She hurried back to her room and suited up, her mind full of imaginary arguments, with Anders, with Rakshasa, with herself, trying so hard to figure out what version of whose story made the most sense that she almost didnТt notice where she was until she was in the airlock, trying to focus on going through the drill.
She didnТt use the floods either. And she was glad, now, that the captain had removed her transponder. It had all seemed like some stupid game at the time.
She stood at the edge of the open hatch and hesitated. There was a ladder, of course, but ten meters, in this gravity, was nothing. Her mind knew that, but her eyes couldnТt see it. They couldnТt see much of anything without the floodlights. Even if the ground was really there, it hardly seemed substantial enough to keep her from falling through forever. Like a child playing with magic, she downloaded a virtual landscape in a mesh of faint red grid lines, computer generated on her heads-up display. The robots showed up as moving dots, tagged with their designations. Every outcrop and hunk of machinery was mapped in place.
As long as everything was where it was supposed to be, she shouldnТt need her headlamp. She could walk unmarked among the invisible things. She shivered, then stepped off the edge and fell so slowly she had an odd illusion of shrinking.
With of flip of her wrists, a pair of joystick controls popped into her hands, and the tubing of the rocket nozzles deployed from her backpack like a few scraggly ribs of an umbrella. She floated low over the ground like a bubble in a breeze.
At first, she followed RakshasaТs location marker on her display, but then, on a hunch, she took a detour along the rift where Willie 1-9 had fallen. She had a vague idea that she ought to retrieve the robot before Rakshasa could get to it, but that idea proved to be hopeless. The crack, when she knelt down to it, was sealed with murky ice that scattered the light right back in her face.
While she was looking, RakshasaТs voice spoke softly into her ears. УCareful there, donТt fall in.Ф
She was so startled that she stood too fast and took an unexpected leap, only to be caught in mid-air and brought gently to the ground as she was spun around to face him. His eyes were scrunched up from the brightness of her headlamp, so she turned it off and his face disappeared, and they stood like shadows behind the neon gridwork of their respective displays.
УYou scared the hell out of me,Ф she began. Rakshasa brought his hand to his face in a gesture of silence.
УPrivacy,Ф he said, and switched her over to short-range infrared communication.
УWhat are you doing out here?Ф she asked, though what she really wondered was how he had covered so much ground so quickly.
УSame as you, I think. Trying to understand whatТs going on. Come this way. I want to show you something.Ф He guided her to a nearby bit of asteroid, just like any other bit, and said, УHere it is, the missing piece. Impressive, isnТt it? When you see it up close.Ф
УSee what?Ф
УOh, I forgot. WeТre looking at different realities. Here, download this.Ф Once again he allowed himself a few liberties with her keypad and established a link between their display processors.
Then she could see it, in virtual reality, like the bare spine of some ancient mastodon poking through the ground, but unnaturally straight.
УThe mass driver,Ф she said, peering down its length. УWas it really this big?Ф It was twice her height, and so long she could see the world curve away beneath it while the structure drove straight on like a bridge into nothingness.
УThis is just a rough idea, but I think the scale is about right.Ф
It was a simply rendered model, with a stony, moonlit texture that wasnТt at all realistic, yet compared to the wire-frame rendering of the rest of the virtual landscape it looked substantial, even ancient. She had to resist an impulse to lean on it. Something fired from the tip as she watched, and fell away like a tear down a well.
УYouТve even got it all animated and everything.Ф She sighed.
УSomething weighs on your mind?Ф
УOh, nothing. ItТs a beauty. I was just kind of ... doggone it!Ф She kicked the ground and made a bigger splash than sheТd intended.
УYou wanted it to be your discovery.Ф
УI was on the right track,Ф she said. УI just wasnТt so far along. You got all this from the Willie 1-9 data?Ф
УYes.Ф
УAnd the location? How did you get that?Ф
УI had to make certain assumptions. More than I can prove. But the point is, once you know what to look for, it wonТt be hard to corroborate.Ф
УItТs a beautiful piece of work. I want to know everything, not just what you figured out, but how. I donТt think the captain will appreciate it, though. He wanted me to get the reward.Ф
УI didnТt think he would, either. I would never have shown this to him, or to anyone but you. The others, IТm afraid, have made up their minds to be true to their convictions. You have a more scientific spirit. I can reason with you.Ф
УWhat do you mean?Ф Unexpected flattery had a way of making her suspicious. She glanced back toward the outline of base camp one off in the distance, and then suddenly found the darkness puzzling. In the middle of the night, the whole body of the asteroid would be shielding them from any possible solar flare. So where was everybody? Something in her mind told her to be afraid, but all she could manage was annoyance.
УWeТre not stupid, you know,Ф she said. УWe know all about you and your little character flaw. Tell me if I have this rightЧGnomonics created you, so they still have your loyalty, even though Novinco still governs T-sector asteroids. This is industrial sabotage by some faction that was opposed to the merger, and now you want to pin it on Captain Anders so Gnomonics can sue for the loss.Ф She wished she could see his face now.
УThereТs an interesting thought. Except ... since those companies have merged, that means they would be suing themselves, doesnТt it?Ф
Damn. УOkay. Right ... even better. ItТs the Consortium that has the most to lose. TheyТve been trying to ban the use of ganglies all along. Novinco dropped out of the Consortium in order to merge with Gnomonics, so now, if the ruling comes down on jurisdiction ... wait a minute, let me think how we fit into this....Ф
УNot much time left for thinking, IТm afraid. YouТre on the right track, though. Sometimes the hardest part is to realize when something is missing. ItТs like what the robots must have gone through. Imagine how they must feel, living, as they do, at the edge of awareness. They live to follow the current trend. Now build a mass driver. Now tear it down and obliterate its traces. And then one day a common thought comes to them, saying, СHide from yourself all memory of what you have done.ТФ