"Rampart World - 02 - Orion Arm" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

www.randomhouse.com/delrey/

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-91747

ISBN 0-345-39519-0

Manufactured in the United States of America

First American Edition: April 1999

10 987654321

Prologue

His Daimler-Tori hoppercraft hurtles down from the ionosphere on its programmed course. The time is 0247 hours and the appointment with Alistair Drummond is at 0330. Below, the land is hidden by a thick layer of clouds, but the ship's ground display shows the enormous expanse of the capital conurbation and its satellite residential communities, spread along the entire northern shore of Lake Ontario.
The hopper joins a sparse swarm of other light aircraft hovering within a holding pattern at nine thousand meters. The ship's navigation unit says: "Now arriving Toronto Conurb ATZ. Please supply next routing."
He has dozed fitfully most of the way from the Sky Ranch in Arizona, exhausted by the stress of the general board meeting and fearful of the challenge that lies ahead. Rousing with a muttered curse, he removes the templets of the dream machine and says: "Wait."
The navigator acknowledges.
He leaves the flight deck and enters the Daimler's tiny lavatory. After relieving himself, he fumbles at the convenience console and calls up shave-gel, mouth rinse, an astringent towel, and a mild stimulant. As he completes the grooming ritual and the drug takes hold, his reflection in the mirror changes. The features lose the blotched puffiness of fatigue, becoming keen and judicial, and the sunken, haunted eyes take on a counterfeit sparkle. He combs his hair low on his forehead and to the side, concealing the prominent widow's peak that characterizes so many members of his famous family.
Returning to the flight deck, he opens a locker, removes a hooded featherweight soft-armor jacket with a one-way visor and puts it on over the tropical business suit he had worn to the board meeting. The personal weaponry can wait until he's on the ground.
He addresses the ship's navigator again. "Go to Blue Disenfranchised Persons Reserve. Prep for manual touchdown at junction of Mamertine and Borstal streets."
"Warning. This area is outside the jurisdiction of Toronto Conurb Public Safety-"
"Cancel advisory."
"Warning: Touchdown in a DPR is at your own risk. No aid units will respond to emergency summonsЧ"
"Cancel."
"Warning. Touchdown in a DPR will render all vehicle insurance coverage null and void. The following precautions areЧ "
"Cancel all advisories and go."
"Air access to Blue DPR visitor landing sites requires barrier override code. Please enter code."
His fingers tremble only slightly as he plugs in the data-dime furnished by Galapharma's Arizona covert op. The navigator blinks in approval.
"Confirmed. En route."
The hoppercraft drops through the cloud deck to an altitude of less than five hundred meters. It comes in from the south, over the dead-black lake. Rain is falling heavily, blurring the pinpricks of colored light delineating the cityscape below. Only the Toronto core and its adjacent maze of islands to the east are clearly visible, shielded in the tenuous golden glitter of a Class One force-umbrella nearly forty kilometers in diameter. Protected from the weather, handsome government buildings and the proud bright crystalline towers of the Hundred Concerns defy the stormy summer night.
The panorama is gorgeous, but he is in no mood to appreciate it. He calls up a triple-shot espresso with a tot of cognac and sips it, speaking the magic words aloud: "Calm. Competence. Courage."
He possesses all three qualities in abundance, and they will carry him through the upcoming ordeal. However, since he is the bearer of disappointing news, he rehearses the spin angle he has calculated will be most effective with Alistair Drum-mond. Galapharma's CEO will probably be furious at the setback, but Drummond is no fool, and he'll have to concede that the Rampart takeover can be leveraged only with inside assistance.
His assistance.
There is really nothing for him to be afraid of.
Coventry Blue is finally gone, along with the other wretched excesses that were tolerated by a compliant CHW government under the corrupt thumb of galactic Big Business. Nowadays, white-collar criminalsЧlike himЧget their comeuppance in a more humane, if less colorful, manner.
Too bad.
He deserved Coventry Blue if anyone did, the treacherous bastard. But I suppose I'm prejudiced...
Before the Haluk War, the penal institution that combined the worst aspects of an ancient Soviet gulag with anything-goes 2050-vintage Las Vegas was situated on the western outskirts of Toronto. It was the largest and most flagrantly mismanaged Disenfranchised Persons Reserve in the Commonwealth. Nobody seems to know how the dark carnival aspect first invaded this particular Coventry, but it undoubtedly persisted because the Hundred Concerns found it useful as a tangible deterrent to corporate disloyalty. Among other things.
The DPRs were originally designed as walled, self-contained penitentiary villages, providing their lifer inmates with an environment that was supposed to allow them a limited amount of independence and dignity. Self-government by the highly educated felons was one of the prime organizing principles, and in most of the Coventries the system worked well enough. Guards kept order, but under the original charter, they operated more like a small-town police force than like jailers. The convict population lived in apartments instead of cells. They didn't have to wear uniforms. There was no onerous regimentation. The prisoners had ample opportunity for gainful employment and recreation, and according to regulations, they were allowed visitors once a week. Life in a conventional Disenfranchised Persons Reserve wasn't all peaches and cream, but it wasn't a lunatic jamboree of Neronian depravity, either.
The same couldn't be said about Coventry Blue.
Most of the luckless felons sentenced to permanent residence there (some having been apprehended by me, when 1 was an enforcement agent for the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat) would have sold their souls to be elsewhere. At the same time, naughty-minded free citizens on the Outside were paying good money to get into the damned place!
Blue's transient clientele came from all over the home world and from adjacent planets of the Orion Arm. The goal: to party down and dirty. Libertine tourists romping along the notorious Blue Strip could count on rubbing elbowsЧ if nothing elseЧwith distinguished local citizens, many of them members of the capital's political and corporate upper-crust who might deplore the place's wickedness in the public forum but didn't hesitate to indulge illicit Blue itches when the need arose. To the more vicious variety of well-heeled thrillseeker, the sort who could afford the stiff bribe for the night entry code and the outrageous fees charged for the unique attractions, Coventry Blue was the carnal cruise destination of choice: zero-K cool, the ultimate hoot, where vile amusements weren't bloodless virtual reality, but shockingly, deliciously, perilously actual.
And legal, within the walls. After all, the inmate purveyors were Thrown Away, stripped of citizenship, nonpersons. In law, not even the probationary disenfranchisedЧsuch as I was, in those daysЧhad any civil rights. Throwaways condemned to Coventry Blue were the lowest of the low, officers and middle management employees who had violated important statutes of their Interstellar Corporation or Amalgamated Concern, threatening the very economic foundation of the Commonwealth of Human Worlds.
A certain percentage of Blue inmate newcomersЧ especially naifs who had disbelieved the dire rumors they'd heard about the placeЧcommitted suicide when they realized that the prison was under the absolute control of exploitative convict gangs; but the majority just caved in to the inevitable and decided to go with the flow, accepting employment in the illegal enterprises operated by inmate kingpins. If life became too unbearable, oblivion was available in the form of cheap drugs, buzzheadmg, or old-fashioned alcohol that could be purchased with the monthly dole if one skimped on frivolities such as food and clothing.
Religious leaders, left-wing media pundits, Reversionists, and other powerless moral guardians of the time called Coventry Blue a pervert's playground, a stinking sore on the backside of the capital conurbation, the epitome of everything that was rotten in the Commonwealth of Human Worlds during those bad old days of yesteryear. Right-thinking citizens were gratified when Blue was finally shut down during the sweeping reforms that followed the war and the downfall of the Hundred Concerns.
Lots of wrong-thinkers were relieved, too. Including him.
But I still get a smidgen of wicked satisfaction imagining how it must have been on that night of January 18, 2233, when he visited the infamous den of iniquityЧunder strong protest, of course.
He prided himself in knowing almost nothing about Coventry Blue. Its sordid activities went unreported by the legitimate media, and he would never have dreamed of entering its restricted-access smutsite on the PlaNet. He wasn't interested in that sort of thing.
The quest for power was his besetting sin, and in pursuit of it he had conspired to betray his own family's Starcorp to a predatory business rival, allying himself with a megalomaniac who might or might not decide to feed him to the wolves when his usefulness was over.