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

p-suit's external speaker.

"Where are they! Are they dead!"

Echo raised his hands. He felt very calm, although his heart was beating quickly and lightly. Its rapid pulse
tremored in his fingertips. He said, "Not exactly."

Slash and Port stood up behind Captain Achilles, throwing off their dust-covered blankets, raising their
hoses. Captain Achilles managed to half-turn before they started to spray him; arms already stuck to his
sides, he fell beneath falling sheets of hardening polymer. Echo bounded forward and ripped the antenna
from his backpack.

The first part was over.

The five techs, working with feverish haste, blinded the cameras with polymer, loaded kegs of polymer
mix into the bucket elevator, packed them with crude gunpowder made from rations burned to charcoal,
nitrates from the recycling toilet and sulphur from a couple of lamp batteries. Slash and Port lashed
themselves to the underside of the bucket with strips torn from their underalls and, with practiced
synchronization, Echo pressed the return button in the same moment that Syntax lit the
gunpowder-soaked fuse.

The fuse fizzled merrily as the elevator slowly rose towards the slot in the chamber's roof. Echo found
that he was counting silently, and wondered if they'd got the fuse length right. It had been difficult to work
out how the elevator's travel time would be affected by its load. Too long, and the soldiers would have
time to stifle it; too short, and the surprise package would blow prematurely.

He was still counting when the elevator, with the two half-naked men swinging beneath it, vanished into
the shadows high above. A minute passed. Echo began to think that it had all gone wrong -- and a dull
thud shook dust from the roof. He and Syntax and Basic whooped and hugged each other, broke apart
when they heard a ragged burst of gunfire.

Silence. Then a body dropped out of the darkness, slammed against the black flank of the Artifact and
tumbled down, arms and legs akimbo, landing with a horrible wet broken noise on a slab of rock. It was
Port. He had been shot in the chest and face. The three techs were still staring at him when the bucket
elevator started back down. Slash was standing on a freeform sculpture of solidified polymer. Only then
did they know that they had won.

##########

"We'll kill all of you," Captain Achilles told Echo.

The techs had used solvent to clean polymer from his rifle, and more solvent to free him. They had made
him shuck his p-suit at gunpoint, and then had tied him up. He lay on the ground in his underalls, arms
lashed behind his back, legs drawn up because his ankles were tied to his wrists. He glared up at Echo
and said, "Kill me now, bro. Because I mean to kill you."

Echo said, "We'll leave you and the other two here, at the bottom of the shaft, no p-suits, no way of
contacting the outside. Just like you left us. The rest of your soldiers will come and find you, sooner or
later, and meanwhile you could do worse than study the Artifact, and think about everything I've told
you."