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

because I didn't react with my normal speed. I just blinked, licked my
lips and stifled a yawn.
"Yeah, what?"
Suit informed me; something massing slightly less than me, two klicks
closer to the splinter, on a slightly different orbit. I knew it was
Yarrow; also that something was wrong. She was drifting. In my blackout
I'd undoubtedly programmed suit to take me down, but Yarrow appeared not
to have done anything except bail out.
I jetted closer. And then saw why she hadn't programmed her suit. Would
have been tricky. She wasn't wearing one.

I hit ice an hour later.
Cradling Yarrow - she wasn't much of a burden, in the splinter's weak
gravity - I took stock. I wasn't ready to mourn her, not just yet. If I
could quickly get her to the medical suite aboard the defector's ship
there was a good chance of revival. But where the hell was the wreck?
Squandering its last reserves of fuel, suit had deposited us in a clearing
among the graveyard of ruined wasps. Half submerged in ice, they looked
like scorched scrap-iron sculptures; phantoms from an entomologist's worst
nightmare. So there'd been a battle here, back when the splinter was just
another drifting lump of ice. Even if the thing was seamed with silicates
or organics, it would not have had any commercial potential to either
side. But it might still have had strategic value, and that was why the
wasps had gone to war on its surface. Trouble was - as we'd known before
the attack - the corpses covered the entire surface, so there was no
guessing where we'd come down. The wrecked ship might be just over the
nearest hillock - or another ten kilometers in any direction.


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I felt the ground rumble under me first. Hunting for the source of the
vibration, I saw a quill of vapour reach into the sky, no more than a
klick away. It was a geyser of superheated ice.
I dropped Yarrow and hit dirt, suit limiting motion so that I didn't
bounce. Looking back, I expected to see a dimple in the permafrost, where
some rogue had impacted.
Instead, the geyser was still present. Worse, it was coming steadily
closer, etching a neat trench. A beam weapon was making that plume, I
realised - like one of the party batteries aboard ship. Then I wised up.
That was Mouser. The demons had worked their way into its command
infrastructure, reprogramming it to turn against us. Now Mouser worked for
the defector.
I slung Yarrow over one shoulder and loped away from the boiling impact
point. Fast as the geyser moved, its path was predictable. If I made
enough lateral distance the death-line would sear past -
Except the damn thing turned to follow me.
Now a second flanked it, shepherding me through the thickest zone of wasp
corpses. Did they have some significance for the defector? Maybe so, but I