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

were like the capillaries in a vitrified eyeball; faint as the structure

in a raw surveillance image. But once within the airspace boundary of the

Europan Demarchy, traffic-management co-opted the flitter, vectoring it

into a touchdown corridor. In three days Mishenka would return, but then

he would disable the avionics, kissing the ice for less than ten minutes.

"Not too late to abort," Mishenka said, a long time later.

"Are you out of your tiny mind?"

The younger man dispensed a frosty Covert Ops smile. "We've all heard what

the Demarchy do to spies, Marius."

"Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?"

"I'll leave being psychotic to you, Marius - you're so much better at it."

Vargovic nodded. It was the first sensible thing Mishenka had said all

day.

They landed an hour later. Vargovic adjusted his Martian businesswear,

tuning his holographically-inwoven frock coat to project red sandstorms;

lifting the collar in what he had observed from the liner's passengers was

a recent Martian fad. Then he grabbed his bag - nothing incriminating

there; no gadgets or weapons - and exited the flitter, stepping through

the gasket of locks. A slitherwalk propelled him forward, massaging the

soles of his slippers. It was a single cultured ribbon of octopus skin,

stimulated to ripple by the timed firing of buried squid axons.

To get to Europa you either had to be sickeningly rich or sickeningly

poor. Vargovic's cover was the former: a lie excusing the single-passenger

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