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

smothered the concussion. For a moment I thought we'd made it, then the
machine began to decelerate slowly to a dead halt. Wendigo convened with
the Queen and told me the line was blocked. We disembarked into vacuum.
Ahead, the tunnel ended in a wall of jumbled ice.
After a few minutes we found a way through the obstruction, Wendigo
wrenching aside boulders larger than either of us. "We're only half a
klick from the surface," she said, as we emerged into the unblocked tunnel
beyond. She pointed ahead, to what might have been a scotoma of absolute
blackness against the milky darkness of the tunnel.
"After that, a klick overland to the wreck." She paused. "Realise we can't
go home, Spirey. Now more than ever."
"Not exactly spoilt for choice, are we."
"No. It has to be the halo, of course. It's where the splinter's headed
anyway; just means we'll get there ahead of schedule. There are other
Splinterqueens out there, and at the very least they'll want to keep us
alive. Possibly other humans as well - others who made the same discovery
as us, and knew there was no going home."
"Not to mention Royalists."
"That troubles you, doesn't it?"
"I'll deal with it," I said, pushing forward.
The tunnel was nearly horizontal, and with the splinter's weak gravity it
was easy to make the distance to the surface. Emerging, Fomalhaut glared
down at us, a white-cored bloodshot eye surrounded by the wrinklelike dust
lanes of the inner Swirl. Limned in red, wasp corpses marred the
landscape.
"I don't see the ship."
Wendigo pointed to a piece of blank caramel-colored horizon. "Curvature's
too great. We won't see it until we're almost on top of it."
"Hope you're right."
"Trust me. I know this place like, well..." Wendigo regarded one of her
limbs. "Like the back of my hand."
"Encourage me, why don't you."
Three or four hundred meters later we crested a scallop-shaped rise of ice
and halted. We could see the ship now. It didn't look in much better shape
than when Yarrow and I had scoped it from Mouser.
"I don't see any wasps."
"Too dangerous for them to stay on the surface," Wendigo said.
"That's cheering. I hope the remaining damage is cosmetic," I said.
"Because if it isn't - "
Suddenly I wasn't talking to anyone.
Wendigo was gone. After a moment I saw her, lying in a crumpled heap at
the foot of the hillock. Her guts stretched away like a rusty comet-tail,
half way to the next promontary.
Quillin was fifty meters ahead, risen from the concealment of a chondrite
boulder.
When Wendigo had mentioned her, I'd put her out of mind as any kind of
threat. How could she pose any danger beyond the inside of a thickship,
when she'd traded her legs for a tail and fluke, just like Yarrow? On dry
land, she'd be no more mobile than a seal pup. Well, that was how I'd
figured things.