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

Yarrow and then me.
"Intelligence was mistaken," she said. "Seems the defector doctored
records to conceal the theft of those countermeasures. But you harmed her
anyway?"
"Just," said Yarrow. "Her quackdrive's spewing out exotics like Spirey
after a bad binge. No hull damage, but..."
"Assessment?"
"Making a run for the splinter."
Wendigo nodded. "And then?"
"She'll set down and make repairs." Yarrow paused, added: "Radar says
there's metal on the surface. Must've been a wasp battle there, before the
splinter got lobbed out of the Swirl."
The delegate nodded in my direction. "Concur, Spirey?"
"Yes sir," I said, trying to suppress the nervousness I always felt around
Wendigo, even though almost all my dealings with her had been via
simulations like this. Yarrow was happy to edit the conversation
afterwards, inserting the correct honorifics before transmitting the
result back to Tiger's Eye - but I could never free myself of the
suspicion that Wendigo would somehow unravel the unedited version, with
all its implicit insubordination.
Not that any of us didn't inwardly accord Wendigo all the respect she was
due. She'd nearly died in the Royalist strike against Tiger's Eye fifteen
years ago - the one in which my mother was killed. Actual attacks against
our two mutually opposed comet bases were rare, not happening much more
than every other generation - more gestures of spite than anything else.
But this had been an especially bloody one, killing an eighth of our
number and opening city-sized portions of our base to vacuum. Wendigo was
caught in the thick of the kinetic attack.
Now she was chimeric, lashed together by cybernetics. Not much of this
showed externally - except that the healed parts of her were too flawless,
more porcelain than flesh. Wendigo had not allowed the surgeons to regrow
her arms. Story was she lost them trying to pull one of the injured
through an open airlock, back into the pressurised zone. She'd almost made
it, fighting against the gale of escaping air. Then some no-brainer hit
the emergency door control, and when the lock shut it took Wendigo's arms
off at the shoulder, along with the head of the person she was saving. She
wore prosthetics now; gauntleted in chrome.
"She'll get there a day ahead of us," I said. "Even if we pull twenty
gees."
"And probably gone to ground by the time you get there."
"Should we try a live capture?"
Yarrow backed me up with a nod. "It's not exactly been possible before."
The delegate bided her time before answering. "Admire your dedication,"
she said, after a suitably convincing pause. "But you'd only be postponing
a death sentence. Kinder to kill her now, don't you think?"


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