"Alastair Reynolds - Spirey And The Queen (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

lain against the splinter's surface.
But her head looked better. When she hit vac, biomodified seals would have
shut within her skull, barricading every possible avenue for pressure,
moisture or blood loss. Even her eyelids would have fused tight. Implanted
glands in her carotid artery would have released droves of friendly
demons, quickly replicating via nonessential tissue in order to weave a
protective scaffold through her brain.
Good for an hour or so - maybe longer. But only if the hostile demons
hadn't screwed with Yarrow's native ones.


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"You were about to tell me about the wasps," I said, as curious to hear
the rest of Wendigo's story as I was to blank my doubts about Yarrow.
"Well, it's rather simple. They got smart."
"The wasps?"
She clicked the steel fingers of her hand. "Overnight. Just over a hundred
years ago."
I tried not to look too overwhelmed. Intriguing as all this was, I wasn't
treating it as anything other than an outlandish attempt to distract me
from the main reason for my being here, which remained killing the
defector. Wendigo's story explained some of the anomalies we'd so far
encountered - but that didn't rule out a dozen more plausible
explanations. Meanwhile, it was amusing to try and catch her out. "So they
got smart," I said. "You mean our wasps, or theirs?"
"Doesn't mean a damn anymore. Maybe it just happened to one machine in the
Swirl, and then spread like wildfire to all the trillions of other wasps.
Or maybe it happened simultaneously, in response to some stimulus we can't
even guess at."
"Want to hazard a guess?"
"I don't think it's important, Spirey." She sounded like she wanted to put
a lot of distance between herself and this topic. "Point is it happened.
Afterwards, distinctions between us and the enemy - at least from the
point of view of the wasps - completely vanished."
"Workers of the Swirl unite."
"Something like that. And you understand why they kept it to themselves,
don't you?"
I nodded, more to keep her talking.
"They needed us, of course. They still lacked something. Creativity, I
guess you'd call it. They could evolve themselves incrementally, but they
couldn't make the kind of sweeping evolutionary jumps we'd been feeding
them."
"So we had to keep thinking there was a war on."
Wendigo looked pleased. "Right. We'd keep supplying them with innovations,
and they'd keep pretending to do each other in." She halted, scratching at
the unwrinkled skin around one eye with the alloy finger of one hand.
"Clever little bastards."