"Paul McAuley - Interstitial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Interstitial

Paul MacAuleyey

A short story that was first published in Interzone.



Echo huddled under his thin blanket, clutching the pillow to his head and
feigning sleep as footsteps marched down the aisle towards his bunk. His chip
told him it was just after three in the morning. He was horribly tired, his
blood glucose low, his muscles poisoned by fatigue. Ever since the
Copernicus Alliance had taken Little Tokyo, some four hundred hours ago,
South Pole had been on a war footing. Purity squads had rounded up and
executed recalcitrant techs in an orgy of self-righteousness. The upper levels
had been evacuated, the greenhouses stripped, the defense systems mobilized.
After finishing a twenty-hour shift, Echo had collapsed into his bunk without
even making a stop at the canteen, but he was too wired to sleep.
The footsteps drew closer and closer, undeniably vectoring on Echo's bunk. His heartbeat spiked as the
thin Mylar curtain he had tacked up for privacy was ripped aside. Light washed red across his squeezed
eyelids. Someone spoke into his ear: a harsh and familiar voice, the voice of his brother, Captain Achilles.

"Rise and shine, Dave, you unrecycleable piece of shit. Time to go to work."

Echo was eighteen, the median age for techs. He had been working since age twelve; only his eldest
brother still used his birth name. Captain Achilles had five years on him, a grizzled veteran who had
survived two skirmishes with patrols from the Copernicus Alliance. He had been a bully when both of
them were being raised by their dam, and was a bully still. He pulled Echo out of his bunk into the
freezing dark of the dorm, told him to leave his boots because there was no time to put them on, and to
leave the rest of his stuff as well.

Captain Achilles was bulked out by an armoured p-suit with a chameleon paint-job, its helmet hung from
the utility belt. Echo was wearing only thin underalls, and because it was the middle of the long lunar
night, power in the dorms was strictly rationed. It was easily ten below freezing; the cold of the floor
scorched the tender soles of his bare feet. Echo said, between clenched teeth, "You fucker," and was
rewarded with a cuff to the back of his head.

"I got you a prime job," Captain Achilles said, pushing Echo ahead of him through between tiered bunks.
He was a very tall man, with close-cropped hair and a long thin face whose pronounced chin always
looked swarthy. He added, with calculated nastiness, "You're going to love it."

Echo knew that Captain Achilles was crazy. All soldiers were stone-cold crazy. It was the price of
eternal pumped-hard vigilance, overdoses of testosterone and steroids, and the combat programs in their
heads. Since they weren't yet officially at war, this had to be some deeply dangerous bad-ass mission,
just the kind of thing a soldier would love. He said, "Oh shit. You bastard. You're putting me on the front
line."

"You techs are all the same. Snivelling worms with no guts."
"You mean no backbones," Echo said, which earned him another cuff. By now they were bouncing along
narrow corridors lit only by red emergency lights, as if Echo were a virus being chased down a capillary