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

"Isn't it obvious?"
"Then you did defect."
"We were trying to make contact with the Royalists. Trying to make peace."
In the increasingly dim light I saw her shrug. "It was a long-shot,
conducted in secrecy. When the mission went wrong, it was easy for Tiger's
Eye to say we'd been defecting."
"Bullshit."
"I wish."
"But you sent us."
"Not in person."
"But your delegate - "
"Could be made to say anything my enemies chose. Even to order my own
execution as a traitor."
We paused to switch on our suit lamps. "Maybe you'd better tell me
everything."
"Gladly," Wendigo said. "But if this hasn't been a good day so far, I'm
afraid it's about to go downhill."

There'd been a clique of high-ranking officers who believed that the Swirl
war was intrinsically unwinnable. Privy to information not released to the
populace, and able to see through Tiger's Eye's own carefully filtered
internal propaganda, they realised that negotiation - contact - was the
only way out.
"Of course, not everyone agreed. Some of my adversaries wanted us dead
before we even reached the enemy." Wendigo sighed. "Too much in love with
the war's stability - and who can blame them? Life for the average citizen
in Tiger's Eye isn't that bad. We're given a clear goal to fight for, and
the likelihood of any one of us dying in a Royalist attack is small enough
to ignore. The idea that all of that might be about to end after four
hundred years; that we all might have to rethink our roles... well, it
didn't go down too well."
"About as welcome as a fart in a vac-suit, right?"
Wendigo nodded. "I think you understand."
"Go on."
Her expedition - Wendigo and two pilots - had crossed the Swirl
unchallenged. Approaching the Royalist cometary base, they'd expected to
be questioned - perhaps even fired upon - but nothing had happened. When
they entered the stronghold, they understood why.
"Deserted," Wendigo said. "Or we thought so, until we found the
Royalists." She expectorated the word. "Feral, practically. Naked, grubby
subhumans. Their wasps feed them and treat their illnesses, but that's as
far as it goes. They grunt, and they've been toilet-trained, but they're
not quite the military geniuses we've been led to believe. "
"Then..."
"The war is...nothing we thought." Wendigo laughed, but the confines of
her helmet rendered it more like the squawking of a jack-in-the-box. "And
now you wonder why home didn't want us coming back?"

Before Wendigo could explain further, we reached a wider bisecting tunnel,
glowing with its own insipid chlorine-coloured light. Rather than the