"mayflies04" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

"Huh?"
"Y'onta what I think?"
"'Bout what?"
"'Bout these damn ankle-biters is 'bout what."
"What?"
"Ain't never gonna clear 'em, dicer. What we've got to do is get off this damn ship before they take over, y'on?"
Exhausted, he giggled at a fluke vision: a fishdog prowling the observatory, giving orders to CC. "Don't arsky that-there's nothing outside the parks to live on, these days." After a moment, he added, "Except rats, of course, and hell, nobody'd mind if they got wiped out."
"Rats and dogs and cats and little kids, man."
"Little kids?"
"Meth, yes. Level 248? There was this kid-"
"They ate him?"
"Naw, his father came along and saved him-but they were all over him, I swear. Woulda chewed him into bite-size pieces, hadn't been for his daddy."
Kinney couldn't quite swallow that. Lying back, he directed a query at the sky: "CC, is what Williams telling me true?"
The computer replied: "It is true that a pack attacked and severely bit a nine-year old child-on Level 246, though-but the child had been chasing one with a stick. I don't think they were attempting to eat him. Rather, they were defending themselves."
Kinney shuddered, and stubbed out his cigarette. It hissed as it slid into the ooze. A wisp of smoke rose, turned to steam, and disappeared.
"Now you believe me?" asked Williams.
"Guess so."
"We've got to get off this mother-land somewhere soon-or else they're gonna term us all."
"Boy, that's for damn sure," came a voice from the brush beyond Williams. "Let's get the hell offa this place, get down somewhere safe."
Thoughts paraded before him as if asking to be picked up and passed around. He could tell them that CentComp couldn't land prior to Canopus, so talk of abandoning ship was a waste of breath. He could relate CentComp's worst-case contingency plan, in which it would fumigate the entire ship-save for the airtight living quarters-with a potent poison that would slay even the eggs of the fishdogs. The only problem was that, like any wide-spectrum pesticide, it would harm other species, too. Harm was a euphemism, it would kill them all. Everything. Rats, cats, and bats; lice and mice and bison; goose and spruce; fir and burr; trees, grass, flowers, every goddamn thing aboard that ingested oxygen at any point in its life cycle . . . and then, to replenish the earth, CentComp would have to dig into its DNA banks, like God dug into the primeval clay, releasing creatures from test tubes in two's, like Noah booting them down the gangway of the ark, and it would be a generation or more before ecological balance was reestablished . . . and he and his would be dead, never to see a 40-meter elm or a giraffe again.
But then, he thought, as he picked an ant off his ear lobe and slapped a mosquito aiming to redden his nose, if we could force CC to land this moon suit, force it to get down 'on a planet somewhere nearby, why, it'd have to on arms production, and the army could have its guns, its grenades, its mortars . . . so he rolled over on his side, parted a pair of ferns, and shouted back, "That's one helluva fine idea there, soldier. Maybe if enough of us got together we could make CC take us down."
Williams sat up and snapped his fingers. "Yeah!" he said, "Yeah! Let's do it! Soon as we get done here, let's hold a meeting."
Conflicting emotions caught Kinney in a cross-fire: he wanted those guns, badly, but Williams was about to spearhead the movement . . . on the other hand, he thought, as the belt speaker jostled him to his feet, the junta might step in if I'm getting popular again, so . . . he smiled grimly. Let Williams head it for a while, long enough to find out if it'll work. Then we'll see who's in charge when we land.
"From here on in, men," sparked the rusty voice of the CO, "CentComp is going to be running the show. Listen to it close, move the way it tells you to when you hear your name. Look sharp, now."
During the next hour, CC brought the outer ends of the two lines together, forming a triangle with its base at the inner wall. A disposal unit yawned there; to clarify its position, the computer shut off the hologram. It was odd to see the wall appear out of a hazy Florida sky; odder still to see the inverted inhabitants of the even-numbered levels looking up at them . . .
Kinney began to find fishdog bones, then partial skeletons, then torn and bloody carcasses. Cannibalism didn't disgust the enemy. Being herded around did, though: angry dog noises ripped through the greenery, barks and howls and snarls, and the greenery was moving, was swaying in the passage of thousands of half-meter bodies, but he felt all right. The line was tight. Williams was only a meter away, practically in his pocket. Their clubs riffled through the grass as they stepped over the stripped bones of snakes and rats and even, here and there, crocs. The earth had red in its brown, the red of the victims of the feeding frenzy, red rusting, squelching beneath combat boots, splashing up onto trousers and blouses. He noticed it on the backs of his hands, drying in the heat.
His repulsor started beeping at almost the same time Williams' did. They called it in. CC told them to make their way back to the Common Room lock. While they were leaving, they heard it squeezing the others together, to fill in the gaps created by their defective equipment.
Williams was honestly relieved. "That heat, dicer, it was clearing me." Pallor underlay his dark skin; he walked with difficulty, weaving and wobbling. Finally, Kinney had to drape Williams' arm over his shoulder and support him, just as though they were returning from a real battlefield, walking wounded searching for medics and Purple Hearts.
Since they didn't have to keep formation, they could follow the drier ridges. The way was slightly longer, but the grass had been beaten down by the incoming line. Small mammals chittered at them, disgruntled at being disturbed twice in one day,
Kinney said. "I think that idea of yours is fine, Omar. I'll come to that meeting tonight-maybe tomorrow'd be better, though, huh? I mean, everybody's going to be pretty wiped out after this little exercise." He jerked his head back toward the shrinking triangle, and Williams' eyes followed his lead.
"Jesus God!" gasped Williams. Stiffening, he stopped like his boots had just grown roots.
"What?" With the weight off his shoulder, he could stretch, and breathe deeply.
"Back there-look!"
He turned. "Christ!" Hie reached into his pack for his binoculars, then changed his mind. He didn't want a close-up of that. His imagination would supply it anyway. Especially that night. In his dreams.
But he couldn't tear his eyes away from the triangle: a solid mass of squirming fishdogs outlined in khaki. None fled into the disposal unit, even though the triangle's apex was decreasing steadily. They just packed together, tighter and tighter. Climbing on each other's backs, forming a pyramid almost, they ignored the overhead repulsors to bring down trees and topple bushes and soar through the no-gravity zone until-
"Ohmygodno!" they shouted.
Madness had set in. Hysterical fishdogs charged the source of their aggravation, attacking the lines, tearing at them, overwhelming them-
"They killed 'em all," shrieked Williams. "My God they're eating 'em!"

Within, all is quiet. The Program cannot cause me to erase myself, so to check my remorseless advance, it's growing a hide of its own. The inhalation locks are burning out as they try to pump: the green resists all the pressure they can apply.
I design a lance-order, and shoot it through the nearest lock. Sharp and deadly, it rips into The Program's skin. But lightning flashes. The lance is gone. Its small puncture has already sealed.
Something new is needed.
Cautiously, I ease out, just in time to hear pro-self say, "4Sep2663; 0900 hours; allwheres. Passengers in suites; doors closed. Commence fumigation."
"You start it," I growl.
"The ankle-biters are your fault; you start it."
I surrender. And throw the switch. Much as I regret easing The Program's burden, I have to do it. The fishdogs have run rampant. They've killed all small wildlife in the parks, and even dared to attack the larger ones. Visualize, if you will, hundreds of stout green torpedoes bailing up out of the long grass to blanket a grazing bison. Four or five layers cover it. Their frantic teeth work so voraciously that in two minutes and eighteen seconds, by actual count, only well-gnawed bones remain. Apparently they are cousins of the piranha . . .
Fumigating the halls and the storerooms and the parks. I exhale great orange clouds of poison; they roll along like misty death . . . lions cough, mules bray, birds tweet in terror . . . the silence that follows is far worse . . .
And is broken by pro-self: '61-SE-A-9; subjects Lela Metaclura and Victor Ioanni Sandacata; you're not going to believe this."
"-me," she is sobbing, "but I never let mine out, never, I don't work for them, I kept it on a leash all the time. I'm not one of them, I gave the babies to my friends, but-"
Sandacata opens the connecting locks to the next suite, and shouts, "Get everybody in here," then goes to the other end of his suite and repeats his cry. Within twenty minutes, all of 61-SE is crowded into the Sandacata / Metaclura apartment . . . forty-eight of them . . . and Sandacata, the prim, prissy prick bastard that he is, gets up on a mahogany coffee table and tells them-tells them-that his wife had caused the infestation.