"Alastair Reynolds - Chasm City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

have distinct hunting possibilities."
Typical Miguel Dieterling, I thought; always seeing the hunting angle in any given situation.

I made an effort at smiling. "I'll give it back to you in one piece. Failing that, I know what to
get you for Christmas."
We started walking towards the bridge. Neither of us had been in Nueva Valparaiso before,
but that didn't matter. Like a good many of the larger towns on the planet, there was
something deeply familiar about its basic layout, even down to the street names. Most of
our settlements were organised around a deltoid street pattern, with three main
thoroughfares stretching away from the apexes of a central triangle about one hundred
metres along each side. Surrounding that core would typically be a series of successively
larger triangles, until the geometric order was eroded in a tangle of random suburbs and
redeveloped zones. What they did with the central triangle was up to the settlement in
question, and usually depended on how many times the town had been occupied or
bombed during the war. Only very rarely would there be any trace of the delta-winged shuttle
around which the settlement had sprung.

Nueva Valparaiso had started out like that, and it had all the usual street names:
Omdurman, Norquinco, Armesto and so on-but the central triangle was smothered beneath
the terminal structure of the bridge, which had managed to be enough of an asset to both
sides to have survived unscathed. Three hundred metres along each side, it rose sheer and
black like the hull of a ship, but encrusted and scabbed along its lower levels by hotels,
restaurants, casinos and brothels. But even if the bridge hadn't been visible, it was obvious
from the street itself that we were in an old neighbourhood, close to the landing site. Some
of the buildings had been made by stacking freight pods on top of each other, each pod
punctured with windows and doors and then filigreed by two and a half centuries of
architectural whimsy.

"Hey," a voice said. "Tanner fucking Mirabel."
He was leaning in a shadowed portico like someone with nothing better to do than watch
insects crawl by. I'd only dealt with him via telephone or video before-keeping our
conversations as brief as possible-and I'd been expecting someone a lot taller and a lot
less ratlike. His coat was as heavy as the one I was wearing, but his looked like it was
constantly on the point of slipping off his shoulders. He had ochre teeth which he had filed
into points, a sharp face full of uneven stubble and long black hair which he wore combed
back from a minimalist forehead. In his left hand was a cigarette which he periodically
pushed to his lips, while his other hand-the right one-vanished into the side pocket of his
coat and showed no sign of emerging.
"Vasquez," I said, showing no surprise that he had trailed Dieterling and me. "I take it
you've got our man under surveillance?"
"Hey, chill out, Mirabel. That guy doesn't take a leak without me knowing it."

"He's still settling his affairs?"

"Yeah. You know what these rich kids are like. Gotta take care of business, man. Me, I'd be
up that bridge like shit on wheels." He jabbed his cigarette in Dieterling's direction. "The
snake guy, right?"
Dieterling shrugged. "If you say so."

"That's some cool shit; hunting snakes." With his cigarette hand he mimed aiming and firing