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

splinter in her ears, and the knowledge that comes with it is a blackening of vision that threatens to suck
her away. She is not, she knows, screaming at what she can see;

Not at the neatly bandaged stump where her right thigh ends twenty centimeters below her hip; not that.

Not at the stabbed-home comprehension that the ache in her knee is a phantom pain in a limb she no
longer owns; not that.

She's screaming at memory.

The memory of the gurney ride along the quiet corridor, the soft bump and turn into the surgery, and then,
veiled in the drug haze, the rising whine of the saw blade, the grating slip in tone as it bites, and the small,
suckling sizzle of the cauterizing laser that comes after. The memory of the last time, and the sickening,
down-plunging understanding that it's all about to happen again.

"No," she husks. "Please."

A long-fingered hand presses warmly down on her forehead. The Turin shroud countenance looms
above her.

"ShshshshтАжthe cormorant knows whyтАж"
Past the face, she sees movement. Knows it from memory for what it is. The stealthy, unflexing spider-leg
motions of the autosurgeon as it wakes.

Gleaming steelтАж



Above all, the hard lessons of this century have taught us that there must be consistent oversight and
effective constraint, and that the policing systems thus required must operate with unimpeachable levels of
integrity and support.

-Jacobsen Report,
August 2091

CHAPTER 1

H e finally found Gray in a MarsPrep camp just over the Bolivian border and into Peru, hiding behind
some cheap facial surgery and the name Rodriguez. It wasn't a bad cover in itself, and it probably would
have stood standard scrutiny. Security checks in the prep camps were notoriously lax; the truth was that
they didn't much care who you'd been before you signed up. But there were still a few obvious signs you
could look for if you knew how, and Carl, with a methodical intensity that was starting to resemble
desperation, had been looking for weeks. He knew that Gray was up on the altiplano somewhere,
because the trail led there from Bogot├б, and because where else, ultimately, was a variant thirteen going
to run. He knew this, and he knew it was just a matter of time before the traces showed up and someone
called it in. But he also knew, with induction programs everywhere skimping and speeding up to meet
increasing demand, that time was on the other man's side. Something had to give, and soon, or Gray was
going to be gone and Carl wasn't going to get his bounty.

So when the break came, the tiny morsel of data finally fed back from the web of contacts he'd been