"Takeshi Kovacs - 02 - Broken Angels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morgan Richard)

He held out his left hand and pulled back his sleeve to let me see the coils of a winged serpent, tattooed in illuminum paint under the skin. The snake's scales glinted and shone with a light of their own and the wings moved fractionally up and down so that you almost seemed to hear the dry flapping and scraping that they would make. Entwined in the serpent's teeth was the inscription Sanction IP Pilot's Guild and the whole design was wreathed with the words The Ground is for Dead People. It looked almost new.

I shrugged. "Nice work. And?"

"I ran haulage for a group of archaeologues working the Dangrek coast north-west of Sauberville. They were mostly Scratchers, but Ч"

"Scratchers?"

Schneider blinked. "Yeah. What about it?"

"This isn't my planet," I said patiently, "I'm just fighting a war here. What are Scratchers?"

"Oh. You know, kids." He gestured, perplexed. "Fresh out of the Academy, first dig. Scratchers."

"Scratchers. Got it. So who wasn't?"

"What?" he blinked again.

"Who wasn't a Scratcher? You said they were mostly Scratchers, but. But who?"

Schneider looked resentful. He didn't like me breaking up his flow.

"They got a few old hands, too. Scratchers have to take what they can find in any dig, but you always get some vets who don't buy the conventional wisdom."

"Or turn up too late to get a better stake."

"Yeah." For some reason he didn't like that crack either. "Sometimes. Point is we, they, found something."

"Found what?"

"A Martian starship." Schneider stubbed out his cigarette. "Intact."

"Crap."

"Yes, we did."

I sighed again. "You're asking me to believe you dug up an entire spaceship, no sorry, starship, and the news about this somehow hasn't got round? No one saw it. No one noticed it lying there. What did you do, blow a bubblefab over it?"

Schneider licked his lips and grinned. Suddenly he was enjoying himself again.

"I didn't say we dug it up, I said we, found it. Kovacs, it's the size of a fucking asteroid and it's out there on the edges of the Sanction system in parking orbit. What we dug up was a gate that leads to it. A mooring system,"

"A gate?" Very faintly, I felt a chill coast down my spine as I asked the question. "You talking about a hypercaster? You sure they read the technoglyphs right?"

"Kovacs, it's a gate." Schneider spoke as if to a small child. "We opened it. You can see right through to the other side. It's like a cheap experia special effect. Starscape that positively identifies as local. All we had to do was walk through."

"Into the ship?" Against my will, I was fascinated. The Envoy Corps teaches you about lying, lying under polygraph, lying under extreme stress, lying in whatever circumstances demand it and with total conviction. Envoys lie better than any other human being in the Protectorate, natural or augmented, and looking at Schneider now I knew he was not lying. Whatever had happened to him, he believed absolutely in what he was saying.

"No." He shook his head, "Not into the ship, no. The gate's focused on a point about two kilometres out from the hull. It rotates every four and a half hours, near enough. You need a spacesuit."