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

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.
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
couldn't see it. The corpses were a rough mix of machines from both sides:
Royalist wasps marked with yellow shell symbols, ours with grinning
tiger-heads. Generation thirty five units, if I remembered Mil-Hist, when
both sides toyed with pulse-hardened optical thinkware. In the seventy-odd
subsequent generations there'd been numerous further jumps: ur-quantum
logics, full-spectrum reflective wasp armour, chameleoflage, quackdrive
powerplants and every weapon system the human mind could devise. We'd
tried to encourage the wasps to make these innovations for themselves, but
they never managed to evolve beyond strictly linear extrapolation. Which
was good, or else we human observers would have been out of a job.
Not that it really mattered now.
A third geyser had erupted behind me, and a fourth ahead, boxing me in.
Slowly, the four points of fire began to converge. I stopped, but kept
holding Yarrow. I listened to my own breathing, harsh above the basso
tremor of the drumming ground.
Then steel gripped my shoulder.

She said we'd be safer underground. Also that she had friends below who
might be able to do something for Yarrow.
"If you weren't defecting," I began, as we entered a roughly hewn tunnel
into the splinter's crust, "what the hell was it?"
"Trying to get home. Least that was the idea, until we realised Tiger's
Eye didn't want us back." Wendigo knuckled the ice with one of her steel
fists, her suit cut away to expose her prosthetics. "Which is when we
decided to head here."
"You almost made it," I said. Then added: "Where were you trying to get
home from?"