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

The grid reference was at the precise center of a small eroded crater sixty
klicks south of the facility, an unreconstructed area in the shadow of the
grabenТs eastern rimwall. Before I headed out, I equipped myself from the armory
and downloaded a hack into the security system so that I could move freely and
unremarked. I was oddly happy, foolishly confident. It felt good to be in action
again. My head was filled with a fat, contented hum as I drove a tricycle cart
along an old construction road. The rendezvous point was about an hour away: I
would have plenty of time to familiarize myself with the terrain and make my
preparations before the assassin, if that was who I had been talking to, turned
up.
I want to make it clear that my actions were in no way altruistic. The only life
I wanted to save was my own. Yes, I knew that I was dying, but no one loves life
more than those who have only a little of it left; no one else experiences each
and every moment with such vivid immediacy. I didnТt intend to throw away my
life in a grand gesture. I wanted to unmask the assassin and escape the special
teamТs inquisition.
The road ran across a flat terrain blanketed in vacuum-cemented grey-brown dust
and littered with big blocks that over the eons had been eroded into soft shapes
by impact cratering. The rimwall reared up to my left, its intricate folds and
bulges like a frozen curtain. Steep cones and rounded hills of mass-wasted talus
fringed its base. To my right, the land sloped away toward a glittering ribbon
of fences and dykes more than a kilometer away, the boundary of the huge
patchwork of fields. It was two in the morning by the clock, but the suspensor
lamps were burning as brightly as they always did, and above the western horizon
the sunТs dim spark was almost lost in their hazy glow.
I was a couple of klicks from the rendezvous, and the road was cutting through a
steep ridge that buttressed a great bulge in the rimwall, when the assassin
struck. I glimpsed a hitch of movement high in a corner of my vision, but before
I could react, a taser dart struck my cart and shorted its motor. A second
later, a net slammed into me, slithering over my torso as muscular threads of
myoelectric plastic tightened in constricting folds around my arms and chest. I
struggled to free myself as the cart piddled to a halt, but my arms were pinned
to my sides by the net and I couldnТt even unfasten the safety harness. I could
only sit and watch as a figure in a black pressure suit descended the steep side
of the ridge in two huge bounds, reached me in two more. It ripped out my phone,
stripped away my utility belt, the gun in the pocket on the right thigh of my
pressure suit and the knife in the pocket on the left thigh, then uncoupled my
main air supply, punched the release of my harness and dragged me out of the
low-slung seat and hauled me off the road. I was dumped on my back near a cart
parked in the shadow of a house-sized block and the assassin stepped back,
aiming a rail-gun at me.
The neutron camera IТd fitted inside my helmet revealed scant details of the
face behind the gold-filmed mirror of my captorТs visor; its demon made an
extrapolation, searched the database IТd loaded, found a match. Debra Thorn,
employed as a paramedic in the facilityТs infirmary for the past two years,
twenty-two, unmarried, no childrenЕ I realized then that IТd made a serious
mistake. The assassin was a doppelganger, all right, but because she was the
double of someone who hadnТt been an adult when the war had ended she must have
been manufactured and decanted much more recently than me. She wasnТt insane,
and she hadnТt spent years under cover. She was killing people because that was