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

But I'd reckoned without Quillin's suit.
Unlike Yarrow's - unlike any siren suit I'd ever seen - it sprouted legs.
Mechanized, they emerged from the hip, making no concessions to human
anatomy. The legs were long enough to lift Quillin's tail completely free
of the ice. My gaze tracked up her body, registering the crossbow which
she held in a double-handed grip.
"I'm sorry," Quillin's deep voice boomed in my skull. "Check-in's closed."
"Wendigo said you might be a problem."
"Wise up. It was staged from the moment we reached the Royalist
stronghold." Still keeping the bow on me, she began to lurch across the
ice. "The ferals were actors, playing dumb. The wasps were programmed to
feed us bullshit."
"It isn't a Royalist trick, Quillin."
"Shit. See I'm gonna have to kill you as well."
The ground jarred, more violently than before. A nimbus of white light
puffed above the horizon, evidence of an impact on the splinter's far
side. Quillin stumbled, but her legs corrected the accident before it
tripped her forward.
"I don't know if you're keeping up with current events," I said. "But
that's our own side."
"Maybe you didn't think hard enough. Why did wasps in the Swirl get smart
before the trillions of wasps back in Sol System? Should have been the
other way round."
"Yeah?"
"Of course, Spirey. GE's wasps had a massive head-start." She shrugged,
but the bow stayed rigidly pointed. "Okay, war sped up wasp evolution
here. But that shouldn't have made so much difference. That's where the
story breaks down."
"Not quite."
"What?"
"Something Wendigo told me. About what she called the second imperative. I
guess it wasn't something she found out until she went underground."
"Yeah? Astonish me."
Well, something astonished Quillin at that point - but I was only
marginally less surprised by it myself. An explosion of ice, and a mass of
swiftly-moving metal erupting from the ground around her. The wasp corpses
were partially dismembered, blasted and half- melted - but they still
managed to drag Quillin to the ground. For a moment she thrashed, kicking
up plumes of frost. Then the whole mass lay deathly still, and it was just
me, the ice and a lot of metal and blood.
The Queen must have coaxed activity out of a few of the wasp corpses,
ordering them to use their last reserves of power to take out Quillin.
Thanks, Queen.
But no cigar. Quillin hadn't necessarily meant to shoot me at that point,
but - bless her - she had anyway. The bolt had transected me with the
precision of one of the Queen's theorems, somewhere below my sternum.
Gut-shot. The blood on the ice was my own.

I tried moving.
A couple of light-years away I saw my body undergo a frail little shiver.