"Daniel Keys Moran - A Tale of the Continuing Time 04 - The AI War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

flattering; on normal duty PKF wore patrol blacks. The combat grays dated back to the Unification War,
and the symbolism was significant, to the PKF at least: they wore them only when going into combat.

Trent's Image cracked their encryption. Clipped French voices filled Trent's skull.

Sergeant Mansion, if you don't get through, I'll send your combat suits in to pull
you out.

Yes, sir.

Very interesting; one of the two remaining Elite out-ranked the Elite Sergeant. Flattering and scary; Trent
pulled himself through the doorway into the fourth room, where the Black Beast awaited him. The door
curled shut behind him and the glowpaint came up.

There was not much to see; tools and racks of spare equipment lined five of the six walls. The airlock,
mounted in the sixth wall, had Trent's spare scalesuit floating next to it. Scalesuits are armored pressure
suits; they are in a real sense the smallest true spacecraft ever built, with propulsion and lifesystems
capable of keeping a human alive for up to a week. Trent suited up while waiting for his archives to be
made: the robot had jacked in the backup 600TB infochips when Trent arrived, and data was already
flowing into them, twenty-two seconds to completion -- even with modern technology, a little less than
three quadrabytes of information took time to transfer --

Suiting up took time a ridiculous amount of time. Trent wiggled into the lower half of the suit, sweat
beading his forehead as the motion ground his broken ribs together again. When he took a deep breath it
sent a stabbing pain through his right side, and he wondered if the rib were poking into his lung. He
exhaled slowly, and trying not to breathe pulled the upper half of the suit on --

Elite Officer Quinette moved down the corridor, hands clenched into fists. Sergeant Mansion followed
behind her, staying near the walls, near the handgrips and footpads. The sonics pounded into her, made
her teeth hurt, but they did not have the effect on her that they would have had on a normal human.
Quinette could feel herself growing uncomfortably warm from the induction field, but not frighteningly so;
the worst was her hands, with the lasers in the tips of her index fingers. Her fingers burned --

A portion of what was, according to the local vertical indicators, the ceiling, pulled aside. The combat
computer at the base of Quinette's skull kicked her off the wall like a billiard ball as the maser cannon
dropped down into the corridor in front of them. The maser's beam missed her and struck Elite Sergeant
Mansion square on with all the heat of a flame-thrower.

Trent the AI watched the proceedings with considerable interest. The maser blast struck Mansion
just before Quinette reached the emplacement; she got her legs up against the ceiling, got a good
grip on the cannon, and ripped it out of its emplacement.

He'd decided to shoot Mansion rather than Quinette for purely pragmatic reasons; Mansion was
more massive than Quinette, less likely to be harmed after the microwave blast had been
distributed across his body. Trent had completed the archive; but his biological component had
not yet managed to get into his pressure suit, so Trent continued spooling the data from the
holocams into the fifth infochip. Mansion's uniform was burning, which did not surprise Trent; but
his hair was also burning, which did. New design work; historically, Elite hair had been stiff as
wire, and completely unburnable. And . . . the reason he'd shot Mansion. Quinette ripped the
man's burning clothing off him, and Trent's holocams got a good look at the Elite's upper back.