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

plying all those weeks, it was hard not to jump. Hard not to dump his painstakingly constructed cover,
fire up his Agency credit and badge, and hire the fastest set of all-terrain wheels available in Copacabana.
Hard not to tear across the border at Agency speed, raising road dust and rumors all the way to the
camp, where Gray, of course, if he had any kind of local support, would be long gone.

Carl didn't jump.

Instead, he called in a couple of local favors and managed to blag a ride across the border with a military
liaison unit-some superannuated patrol carrier with a Colony corporation's logo sun-bleached to fading
on the armored sides. The troops were Peruvian regulars, drafted in from dirt-poor families in the coastal
provinces and then seconded to corporate security duties. They'd be pulling down little more than
standard conscript pay for that, but the interior of the carrier was relatively plush by military standards
and it seemed to have air-con. And anyway, they were tough and young, a sort of young you didn't see
so much in the Western world anymore, innocently pleased with their hard-drilled physical competence
and cheap khaki prestige. They all had wide grins for him, and bad teeth, and none was older than
twenty. Carl figured the good cheer for ignorance. It was a safe bet these kids didn't know the
subcontract rate their high command was extracting from its corporate clients for their services.

Sealed inside the jolting, sweat-smelling belly of the vehicle, brooding on his chances against Gray, Carl
would really have preferred to stay silent altogether. He didn't like to talk, never had. Felt in fact that it
was a much-overrated pastime. But there was a limit to how taciturn you could be when you were getting
a free ride. So he mustered some lightweight chat about next week's Argentina-Brazil play-off and threw
as little of it into the conversational mix as he thought he could get away with. Some comments about
Patricia Mocatta, and the advisability of female captains for teams that were still predominantly male.
Player name checks. Tactical comparisons. It all seemed to go down fine.

"┬┐Eres Marciano?" one of them asked him, finally, inevitably.

He shook his head. In fact, he had been a Martian once, but it was a long, complicated story he didn't
feel like telling.

"Soy contable," he told them, because that was sometimes what he felt like. "Contable de
biotecnologia."

They all grinned. He wasn't sure if it was because they didn't think he looked like a biotech accountant,
or because they just didn't believe him. Either way they didn't push the point. They were used to men
with stories that didn't match their faces.

"Habla bien el espa├▒ol," someone complimented him.

His Spanish was good, though for the last two weeks it was Quechua he'd been speaking mostly,
Mars-accented but still tight up against the Peruvian original that had spawned it. It was what the bulk of
the altiplano dwellers used, and they in turn made up most of the grunt labor force in the prep camps, just
as they still did on Mars. Notwithstanding which fact, the language of enforcement up here was still
Spanish. Aside from a smattering of web-gleaned Amanglic, these guys from the coast spoke nothing
else. Not an ideal state of affairs from the corporate point of view, but the Lima government had been
adamant when the COLIN contracts were signed. Handing over control to the gringo corporations was
one thing, had oligarchy-endorsed historical precedent on its side in fact. But allowing the altiplano
dwellers to shake themselves culturally loose from the grip of coastal rule, well, that would be simply
unacceptable. There was just too much bad history in the balance. The original Incas six hundred years