"Dead Men Walking" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

bulging face of the cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of
black, rock-hard ice.
I was halfway there when a kinetic round struck my left leg with tremendous
force and broke my thigh. I tumbled over hummocked ice and caught hold of a low
pinnacle just before I went over the edge of the ridge. The assassinТs
triumphant shout was a blare of electronic noise in my ears; because she was
using the line-of-sight walkie-talkie I knew that she was almost on me. I pushed
up at once and scuttled toward the chimney like a crippled ape. I had almost
reached my goal when a second kinetic round shattered my right knee. My suit was
ruptured at the point of impact, and I felt a freezing pain as the smart fabric
constricted as tightly as a tourniquet, but I was not finished. The impact of
the kinetic round had knocked me head over heels into a field of fallen
ice-blocks, within striking distance of the chimney. As I half-crawled,
half-swam toward it, a third round took off the top of a pitted block that might
have fallen from the cliffs a billion years ago, and then I was inside the
chimney, and started to climb.
The assassin had no experience of freestyle climbing. Despite my injuries I soon
outdistanced her. The chimney gave out after half a kilometer, and I had no
choice but to continue to climb the naked iceface. Less than a minute later, the
assassin reached the end of the chimney and fired a kinetic round that smashed
into the cliff a little way above me. I flattened against the iceface as a huge
chunk dropped past me with dreamy slowness, then powered straight through the
expanding cloud of debris, pebbles and icegrains briefly rattling on my helmet,
and flopped over the edge of a narrow setback.
My left leg bent in the middle of my thigh and hurt horribly; my right leg was
numb below the knee and a thick crust of blood had frozen solid at the joint.
But I had no time to tend my wounds. I sat up and ripped out the hose of the
water recycling system as the assassin shot above the edge of the cliff in a
graceful arc, taser in one hand, rail gun in the other. I twisted the valve, hit
her with a high-pressure spray of water that struck her visor and instantly
froze. I pushed off the ground with both hands (a kinetic round slammed into the
dusty ice where IТd just been), collided with her in midair, clamped my glove
over the diagnostic port of her backpack, and discharged my second taser dart.
The dart shorted out the electronics in the assassinТs suit, and enough current
passed through the port to briefly stun her. I pushed her away as we dropped
toward the setback, but she managed to fire a last shot as she spun into the
void beyond the edge of the setback. She was either phenomenally lucky or
incredibly skillful: it took off my thumb and three fingers of my right hand.
She fell more than a kilometer. Even in the low gravity, it was more than enough
to kill her, but just to make sure I dropped several blocks of ice onto her. The
third smashed her visor. YouТll find her body, if you havenТt already, more or
less directly below the spot where you found mine.
The assassin had vented most of my air supply and taken my phone and emergency
beacon; the dart IТd used on her had crippled what was left of my pressure
suitТs life support system. The suitТs insulation is pretty good, but IТm
beginning to feel the bite of the cold now, my hand is growing pretty tired from
using the squeeze pump to push air through the rebreather, and IТm getting a bad
headache as the carbon dioxide concentration in my air supply inexorably rises.
I killed the ecosystem of East of Eden by sabotaging the balance of its
atmospheric gases, and now the same imbalance is killing me.