"Paul J. McAuley - Dead Man Walking" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

trained. But that comforting fiction was blown apart the very next day, when another
mutilated body was found.
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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 senatorтАЩs body implied
that heтАЩd been murdered by Goether LyleтАЩs 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
nightтАЩs 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 facilityтАЩs 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 heтАЩd 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 wardenтАЩs 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.
тАЬSo if you come across anything suspicious, donтАЩt 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.тАЭ
I felt a loathsome chill crawl through me. I knew that if Willy and the others realized
that one of тАЬthose thingsтАЭ 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 couldnтАЩt hang
back, couldnтАЩt let things run their course. No one would be able to leave Ariel for the
duration of the emergency security measures, and the specialist team would search
every square centimeter of the facility and Herschel City, check the records and DNA
profile of every prisoner, member of staff, citizen and visitor, and release a myriad tiny
halflife drones designed to home in on anyone breathing out the combination of
metabolic byproducts unique to our kind. The team would almost certainly uncover
the assassin, but they would also unmask me.
Oh, I suppose that I could have hiked out to some remote location on the surface and
hunkered down for the duration, but I had no idea how long the search would last. The
only way I could be sure of evading it would be to force my pressure suit put me in
deep hibernation for a month or two, and how would I explain my absence when I
returned? And besides, I knew that I was dying. I was already taking dangerously
large daily doses of steroids to relieve the swelling of my joints and inflammation of
my connective tissue caused by my pseudo-lupus. Suspended animation would slow
but not stop the progress of my disease. Suppose I never woke up?
I spent a long, bleak night considering my options. By the time the city had begun to
increase its ambient light level and the members of the local troop of spider monkeys
were beginning to hoot softly to each other in the trees outside my little cabin, I knew
what I would have to do. I knew that I would have to find the assassin before the team