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

numb and ceased speaking to him, and Trent shrank and fell back before the great darkness advancing
upon him. The wave of darkness came at last to the place where he awaited it, in the midst of the light:

And died.

Trent the Uncatchable, flying a meter above the pitted, rocky gray surface of Ceres Asteroid, beneath the
light of the distant Sun, shuddered with a wash of sympathetic pain. It was nothing physical, nothing like
the broken bones that burned in his side.

"That was the hard part," he said aloud.

It was the hard part: and it kept getting harder every time one of his Images was lost. Trent did not know
if his own death would be as difficult to deal with, assuming he saw it coming. His Image was larger than
he was in virtually every way, including emotionally. He felt more strongly as Image; and the pain Trent
felt, linked to his Image when it was ended, was only an echo, small and distant, of the experience the
Image itself was having.

And that was the scary part.

Trent moved across the surface of the asteroid, navigating with short bursts of his wrist and ankle
rockets, considering his options. The Vatsayama was coming; Trent's scalesuit gave out a radio
microburst every thirty seconds, giving Trent's current coordinates. It wouldn't help the PKF; without the
key to decode the burst the information was useless, and the radio signal itself was far too short to give
the PKF time to lock in on it.

Assume the PKF troop transport had not been severely damaged when it touched down; the troop
transport would be out there somewhere, looking for Trent. And that was assuming that the troop
transport had come alone; unlikely. A PKF corvette was almost certainly nearby --

His radar detector pinged. Not loudly; they were looking for him, and were not certain where he was. It
didn't surprise Trent; the surface of his scalesuit was covered in polypaint that shaded the scalesuit into its
environment in an eerie fashion. Optical sensors spread across the surface of the scalesuit; a masking
algorithm built into the suit interpreted the information from the optics, tuning the polypaint as Trent
moved. So it was unlikely that the PKF had a visual of him.

The radar detector pinged again. The suit responded as it had been designed; it kicked in with a vague,
flickering radar signal of its own, a fuzzy signal that would generate ghost images everywhere within two
hundred meters of Trent. The optical sensors built into Trent's suit tracked motion, piped it directly to
Trent's inskin: black combat armor rose up over the surface of the asteroid, eclipsing the light from the
distant stars behind it. A single Elite. Trent wondered briefly who it was. Trent knew his enemies; he'd
met several of them over the course of the years, and had databases on the rest.

He scanned ahead, consulting the map he carried in his inskin of the surface of Ceres. It wasn't good;
there wasn't another lock leading into pressure within several kilometers, and Trent wasn't sure he
wanted to try for one anyway. Certainly the PKF had maps of Ceres' surface, including the location of
locks leading to pressure. They'd be watching for Trent -- and Trent could not bring PKF back into
pressure, not while there were unarmed civilians inside, civilians the PKF would kill if they did not get out
of the way quickly enough.

There were no locks nearby; but there was a ravine, a jagged gorge five meters deep, running across the