"Richard Morgan - Thirteen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morgan Richard)

through her like cold water. They're going to crash, they're going to hit something, or something's going to
hit them, something massive and ancient beyond human comprehension tumbling endlessly end-over-end
through the empty night outside the ship. Space travel isn't safe, she was insane to ever think it was, to
sign up for the contract and think she could get away with it, there and home again in one piece as if it
were no more than a suborbital across the Pacific, you just couldn't-

Let go, Ellie. It's the drugs.

Then she realizes where she is. The autosurgeon's folded arachnoid arms wheel past in one quadrant of
her vision as the gurney slots into position on the examination rack. A qualified relief seeps into her.
Something's wrong, but she's in the right place. Horkan's Pride is equipped with the finest automated
medical systems COLIN knows how to build, she's read it in a Colony News digest, the whole
shipboard AI suite was overhauled a couple of weeks before she left. And look, there's a limit to what
can go wrong with a cryocapped body, right, Ellie? Organic functions slow to a chilled crawl, and so
does anything hostile that you might be carrying.

But the panic, the sense of inescapable nemesis, won't let her go. She feels it dull and insistent, like a dog
worrying at an anesthetized limb.
She rolls her head sideways on the gurney, and sees him.

More familiarity, sharper now, jolting through her like current.

Once, on a trip to Europe, she went to the Museo della Sindone in Turin and saw the tortured image
printed on cloth that they keep there. She stood in dimness on the other side of the bulletproof glass,
surrounded by the reverent murmurs of the faithful. Never a believer of any sort herself, Larsen was still
oddly moved by the harsh and hollow lines of the face staring back at her out of the sealed vacuum
chamber. It seemed a testament to human suffering that completely short-circuited its divine pretensions,
that rendered the devotions paid it beside the point. You looked at that face and you were struck by the
sheer stubborn survivability of organic life, the heritage of built-in, bitten-down defiance that the long
march of evolution had gifted you with.

It could be the same man. Here, now.

He's propped against a tall corner cabinet, staring at her, rope-sinewed arms folded across a cage-gaunt
chest whose ribs she can see even through the T-shirt he wears, long straight hair hanging either side of
narrow features drawn even thinner with pain and want. His mouth is a clamped line, etched in between
the sharp chin and blade-boned nose. Hollows cling under the bones in his cheeks.

Her heart surges sluggishly in her chest as she meets his eyes.

"Is it-" With the words, an awful understanding is welling up inside her now, a monstrous recognition that
her conscious mind is still sprinting hard ahead to evade. "Is it my knee? My leg?"

Out of somewhere, abruptly, she finds strength, she props herself up on her elbows, she forces herself to
look.

Sight collides with recollection.

The scream shrills up out of her, rips momentarily through the cobwebby drapery of the drugs in her
system. She can't know how weak it sounds in the cold dimensions of the surgery, inside her it seems to