"Richard Morgan - Broken Angels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morgan Richard)

Kwok's microcam swivelled, making minute hydraulic sounds.
'You taking the new 391, sir?'
'I don't тАФ '
'Hey, Naki. Where are you, man? It's the lieutenant.'
I stayed off the axial deck after that.

Schneider found me the next day, sitting in the officers' convalescent ward, smoking a
cigarette and staring out of the viewport. Stupid, but like the doctor said for fuck's sake. Not
much point in looking after yourself, if that same self is liable at any moment to have the
flesh ripped off its bones by flying steel or corroded beyond repair by chemical fallout.
'Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.'
It took me a moment to place him. People's faces look a lot different under the strain of
injury, and besides we'd both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette,
wondering bleakly if this was someone else I'd got shot up wanting to commend me on a
battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the
loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he'd been able to
bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.
'Thank you. I'm, ah, Jan Schneider.' He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself
to my cigarettes from the table. 'I really appreciate you not ah, not тАФ '
'Forget it. I had.'
'Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.' тАФ I stirred impatiently тАФ
'Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah тАФ '
'Look, Schneider, I don't really care.' I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and
coughed. 'All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now if
you repeat that, I'll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?'
He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped
down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulture-like. When I
stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the
cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the viewport and the planet it showed.
'Exactly,' he said.
'Exactly what?'
Schneider glanced around conspiratorially, but the few other occupants of the ward were
all congregated at the other end of the chamber, watching Latimer holoporn. He grinned
again and leaned closer.
'Exactly what I've been looking for. Someone with some common sense. Lieutenant
Kovacs, I'd like to make you a proposition. Something that will involve you getting out of
this war, not only alive but rich, richer than you can possibly imagine.'
'I can imagine quite a lot, Schneider.'
He shrugged. 'Whatever. A lot of money, then. Are you interested?'

I thought about it, trying to see the angle behind. 'Not if it involves changing sides, no. I
have nothing against Joshua Kemp personally, but I think he's going to lose and тАФ '
'Politics.' Schneider waved a hand dismissively. 'This has nothing to do with politics.
Nothing to do with the war, either, except as a circumstance. I'm talking about something
solid. A product. Something any of the corporates would pay a single figure percentage of
their annual profits to own.'
I doubted very much whether there was any such thing on a backwater world like Sanction
IV, and I doubted even more that someone like Schneider would have ready access to it. But
then, he'd scammed his way aboard what was in effect a Protectorate warship and got medical
attention that тАФ at a pro-government estimate тАФ half a million men on the surface were