"Alastair Reynolds - A Spy In Europa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

A Spy in Europa - a short story by Alastair Reynolds




A Spy in Europa

a short story by Alastair Reynolds

Marius Vargovic, agent of Gilgamesh Isis, savoured an instant of free-fall

before the flitter's engines kicked in, slamming it away from the

Deucalion. His pilot gunned the craft toward the moon below, quickly

outrunning the other shuttles which the Martian liner had disgorged.

Europa seemed to be enlarging perceptibly; a flattening arc the colour of

nicotine-stained wallpaper.

"Boring, isn't it."

Vargovic turned around in his seat, languidly. "You'd rather they were

shooting at us?"

"Rather they were doing something."

"Then you're a fool," Vargovic said, making a tent of his fingers.

"There's enough armament buried in that ice to give Jupiter a second red

spot. What it would do to us doesn't bear thinking about it."

"Only trying to make conversation."

"Don't bother - it's an overrated activity at the best of times."

"Alright, Marius - I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it,

filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate one-time pad and wrote a

fucking two-hundred page report on it. Satisfied?"

"I'm never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn't in my nature."
 But Mishenka was right: Europa was an encrypted document; complexity

masked by a surface of fractured and refrozen ice. Its surface grooves