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

ago and their stubborn thirty-year refusal to behave as a conquered people should, the bloody reprise by
T├║pac Amaru in 1780, the Sendero Luminoso Maoists a bare century back, and more recently still the
upheavals of the familias andinas. The lessons had been learned, the word went out. Never again.
Spanish-speaking uniforms and bureaucrats drove home the point.

The patrol carrier pulled up with a jerk, and the rear door hinged weightily outward. Harsh, high-altitude
sunlight spilled in, and with it came the sound and smell of the camp. Now he heard Quechua, the familiar
un-Spanish cadences of it, shouted back and forth above the noise of machinery in motion. An imported
robot voice trampled it down, blared vehicle reversing, vehicle reversing in Amanglic. There was
music from somewhere, huayno vocals remixed to a bloodbeat dance rhythm. Pervasive under the scent
of engine oil and plastics, the dark meat odor of someone grilling antecuchos over a charcoal fire. Carl
thought he could make out the sound of rotors lifting somewhere in the distance.

The soldiers boiled out, dragging packs and weapons after. Carl let them go, stepped down last and
looked around, using their boisterous crowding as cover. The carrier had stopped on an evercrete apron
opposite a couple of dusty, parked coaches with destination boards for Cuzco and Arequipa. There was
a girdered shell of a terminal building, and behind it Garrod Horkan 9 camp stretched away up the hill, all
single-story prefab shacks and sterile rectilinear street plan. Corporate flags fluttered whitely on poles
every few blocks, an entwined g and h ringed by stars. Through the unglassed windows of the terminal,
Carl spotted figures wearing coveralls with the same logo emblazoned front and back.

Fucking company towns.

He dumped his pack in a locker block inside the terminal, asked directions of a coveralled cleaner, and
stepped back out into the sun on the upward-sloping street. Down the hill, Lake Titicaca glimmered
painfully bright and blue. He slipped on the Cebe smart lenses, settled his battered leather Peruvian
Stetson on his head, and started up the slope, tracking the music. The masking was more local cover than
necessity-his skin was dark and leathered enough not to worry about the sun, but the lenses and hat
would also partially obscure his features. Black faces weren't that common in the altiplano camps, and
unlikely though it was, Gray might have someone watching the terminal. The less Carl stood out, the
better.

A couple of blocks up the street, he found what he was looking for. A prefab twice the size of the units
around it, leaking the bloodbeat and huayno remix through shuttered windows and a double door
wedged back. The walls were stickered with peeling publicity for local bands, and the open door space
was bracketed by two loopview panels showing some Lima ad agency's idea of Caribbean nightlife.
White sand beach and palm trees by night, party lights strung. Bikini-clad criolla girls gripped beer
bottles knowingly and pumped their hips to an unheard rhythm alongside similarly European-looking
consorts. Outside of the band-jet-muscled and cavorting gaily in the background, well away from the
women-no one had skin any darker than a glass of blended Scotch and water.

Carl shook his head bemusedly and went inside.

The bloodbeat was louder once he got in, but not unbearable. The roof tented at second-story height,
nothing but space between the plastic rafters, and the music got sucked up there. At a corner table, three
men and a woman were playing a card game that required calls, apparently without any trouble tracking
one another's voices. Conversation at other tables was a constant murmur you could hear. Sunlight fell in
through the doorway and shutters. It made hard bars and blocks on the floor but didn't reach far, and if
you looked there directly then looked away, the rest of the room seemed dimly lit by comparison.