"Wen Spencer - Tinker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spencer Wen)

company wasn't as reliable. That her security programs needed a dial tone to call the police was a
weakness she'd have to fix, but until then, she was screwed. Shit, they could build a hyperphase
gate in geostationary orbit and put a man in the seas of Europa, but they couldn't get the damn
phones to work on Shutdown Day!
"Sparks, open a channel to the wrecker."
"Done, Boss."
"Oilcan? Can you hear me? Oilcan?" Damn, her cousin was out of the wrecker's cab. She
paused, waiting to see if he would answer, then gave up. "Sparks, at two-minute intervals repeat
following message: 'Oilcan, this is Tinker. I've got trouble. Big trouble. Get back here. Bring
cops. Send cops. I'll probably need an ambulance too. Get me help! Hurry.' End message."
"Okay, Boss."
She landed at the foot of the ladder. A noise to her left made her look up. The elf was on one
of the tarp-covered shuttle booster rockets, pausing to draw his long thin sword, apparently
deciding to stop and fight. Six to oneтАФit would be more a slaughter than a fight. That fact alone
would normally make her sick.
Worse, though, she recognized the elf: Windwolf. She didn't know him in any personal sense.
Their interaction had been limited to an ironically similar situation five years ago. A saurus had
broken out of its cage during the Mayday Faire, chewing its way through the frightened crowd. In
a moment of childish stupidity, she'd attacked it, wielding a tire iron. She had nearly gotten
herself killed. A furious Windwolf had saved her and cast a spell on her, placing a life debt on her
essence, linking her fate with his. If her actions got him killed, she would die too.
Or at least, that's what Tooloo said the spell would do.
Sane logic made her question the old half-elf. Why would Windwolf save her only to doom
her? But Windwolf was an elf nobleтАФthus one of the arrogant domana casteтАФand one had to
keep in mind that elves were alien creatures, despite their human appearance. Just look at loony
old Tooloo.
And according to crazy Tooloo, the life debt had never been canceled.
Of all the elves in Pittsburgh, why did it have to be Windwolf?
"Oh, Tinker, you're screwed with all capital letters," she muttered to herself.
Her scrap yard ran six city blocks, a virtual maze of exotic junk. She had the advantage of
knowing the yard intimately. The first warg charged across the top of a PAT bus sitting next to
the booster rockets. The polymer roof dimpled under its weight; the beast left hubcap-sized
footprints in its wake. Windwolf swung his sword, catching the huge creature in its midsection.
Tinker flinched, expecting blood and viscera; despite their magical origin, wargs were living
creatures.
Along the savage cut, however, there was a crackling brilliance like electrical discharge. For a
second, the warg's body flashed from solid flesh to the violet, intricate, circuitlike pattern of a
spell. That gleaming, rune-covered shell hung in mid-air, outlining the mass of the warg. She
could recognize various subsections: expansion, increase vector, artificial inertia. Inside the
artificial construct hung a small dark massтАФan animal acting like the hand inside of a puppet.
She couldn't identify the controlling beast, shrouded as it was by the shifting lines of spell, but it
looked only slightly larger than a house cat.
What the hell?
Then the spell vanished back to illusionary flesh, reforming the appearance of a great dog.
The monster rammed Windwolf in a collision of bodies, and they went tumbling down off the
rocket.
 These creatures weren't wargs, nor were they totally real. They weren't flesh-and-blood
animals, at least not on the surface. Someone had done a weird illusionary enhancement,
something along the lines of a solid hologram. If she disrupted the spell, the monsters should be
reduced back to the much smaller, and hopefully less dangerous, animal providing the