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

Rhea.
To anyone else it was a meaningless scrawl; to me, it was like a flash of black
lightning that branded an enciphered phone number on my brain. The walls of the
passageway were thickly scribbled with graffiti, much of it pre-war. The message
could have been left there last year or last week; it could have been a trap,
left by agents hunting renegades like me. I didnТt have the nerve to find out. I
went straight to the spaceport and bought a seat on a shuttle to Phoebe, the
gateway port to the other moons of Saturn and the rest of the Outer System. Six
months later, wearing the new identity of Roy Bruce, I became a guard at TPA
Facility 898.
ThatТs why, almost nine years later, I couldnТt be certain that any of my
brothers and sisters had survived, and I was able to convince myself that
Goether Lyle had been the victim of the vicious internal politics of the prison,
killed and mutilated by someone who knew about the black propaganda techniques
in which weТd been trained. But that comforting fiction was blown apart the very
next day, when another mutilated body was found.
* * * *
The victim was a former senator of Baghdad, Enceladus, and a member of the
prison gang that was intermittently at war with the gang to which Goether Lyle
had belonged. A message written in blood on the ground next to the senatorТs
body implied that heТd been murdered by Goether LyleТs cronies, but whoever had
killed him must have done the deed in his cell some time between the evening
count and the end of the nightТs lockdown, spirited his body out of the facility
without being detected, and left it within the field of view of a security
camera that had been hacked to show a recorded loop instead of a live feed.
Members of the rival gangs lived in different blocks, had chips implanted in
their skulls that constantly monitored their movements, and in any case were
under lockdown all night. If the killer was a prisoner, he would have had to
bribe more than a dozen guards; it was far more likely that the senator had been
killed by one of the facilityТs staff. And when I heard what had been done to
the body, I was certain that it was the handiwork of one of my brothers or
sisters. The senator had been blinded before heТd been strangled, and his lungs
had been pulled through incisions in his back. It was a mutilation called the
Blood Eagle that had been invented by the Vikings some two thousand years ago. I
remembered the cold, patient voice of the instructor who had demonstrated it to
us on a corpse.
Someone in the wardenТs office reached the same conclusion. Posted at the top of
our daily orders was an announcement that a specialist team was on its way to
Ariel, and emergency security measures were put in place at the spaceport. That
evening Willy Gup told the sweat lodge that the warden reckoned that it was
possible that the two murders were the work of the kind of vat-grown assassin
used in the Quiet War.
УSo if you come across anything suspicious, donТt be tempted to do anything
stupidly heroic, my brothers. Those things are smart and deadly and completely
without any kind of human feeling. Be like me. Stay frosty, but hang back.Ф
I felt a loathsome chill crawl through me. I knew that if Willy and the others
realized that one of Уthose thingsФ was sitting with them in the steamy heat of
the lodge, they would fall on me at once and tear me limb from limb. And I knew
that I couldnТt hang back, couldnТt let things run their course. No one would be
able to leave Ariel for the duration of the emergency security measures, and the