"A Spy in Europa - a short story by Alastair Reynolds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

flitter. As the slitherwalk advanced he was joined by other arrivals:
business people like himself, and a sugaring of the merely wealthy. Most
of them had dispensed with holographics, instead projecting entoptics
beyond their personal space; machine-generated hallucinations decoded by
the implant hugging Vargovic's optic nerve. Hummingbirds and seraphim were
in sickly vogue. Others were attended by autonomous perfumes which subtly
altered the moods of those around them. Slightly lower down the social
scale, Vargovic observed a clique of noisy tourists - antlered brats from
Circum-Jove. Then there was a discontinuous jump: squalid-looking Maunder
refugees, who must have accepted indenture to the Demarchy. The refugees
were quickly segregated from the more affluent immigrants, who found
themselves within a huge geodesic dome, resting above the ice on
refrigerated stilts. The walls of the dome glittered with duty-free shops,
boutiques and bars. The floor was bowl-shaped, slitherwalks and spiral
stairways descending to the nadir, where a quincunx of fluted marble
cylinders waited. Vargovic observed that the newly-arrived were queueing
for elevators which terminated in the cylinders. He joined a line and
waited.
"First time in Cadmus-Asterius?" asked the bearded man ahead of him,
iridophores in his plum-coloured jacket projecting Boolean propositions
from Sirikit's Machine Ethics in the Transenlightenment.
"First time on Europa, actually. First time Circum-Jove, you want the full
story."
"Down-system?"
"Mars."
The man nodded gravely. "Hear it's tough."
"You're not kidding." And he wasn't. Since the sun had dimmed - the second
Maunder minimum, repeating the behaviour which the sun had exhibited in
the seventeenth century - the entire balance of power in the First System
had altered. The economies of the inner worlds had found it hard to
adjust; agriculture and power-generation handicapped, with concomitant
social upheaval. But the outer planets had never had the luxury of solar
energy in the first place. Now Circum-Jove was the benchmark of First
System economic power, with Circum-Saturn trailing behind. Because of
this, the two primary Circum-Jove superpowers - the Demarchy, which
controlled Europa and Io - and Gilgamesh Isis - which controlled Ganymede,
and parts of Callisto - were vying for dominance.
The man smiled keenly. "Here for anything special?"
"Surgery," Vargovic said, hoping to curtail the conversation at the
earliest juncture. "Very extensive anatomical surgery."

They hadn't told him much.
"Her name is Cholok," Control had said, after Vargovic had skimmed the
dossiers back in the caverns which housed the Covert Operations section of
Gilgamesh Isis security, deep in Ganymede. "We recruited her ten years
ago, when she was on Phobos."
"And now she's Demarchy?"
Control had nodded. "She was swept up in the brain-drain, once Maunder II
began to bite. The smartest got out while they could. The Demarchy - and
us, of course - snapped up the brightest."