"Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

She had traveled twelve hundred kilometers in a day, and now she was
on foot, alone, in a dark alley at night in a foreign country,
preparing to assault a hospital single-handed. And unless they caught
her on. the spot, she was pretty sure that she was going to get away
with it.
This was an area of Nuevo Laredo the locals aptly called
"Salsipuedes," or "Leave-if-you-can." Besides Alex's slick but modest
clinic, it had two other thriving private hospitals stuffed with
gullible gnngos, as well as a monster public hospital, a big septic
killing zone very poorly managed by the remains of the Mexican
government. Jane watched a beat-up robot truck rumble past, marked
with a peeling red cross. Then she watched her hands trembling. Her
unpainted fingertips were ivory pale and full of nervous jitter. Just
like the jitter she had before a storm chase. Jane was glad to see
that jitter, the fear and the energy racing along her nerves. She
knew that the jitter would melt off like dry ice once the action
started. She had learned that about herself in the past year. It was
a good thing to know.
Jane made a final check of her equipment. Glue gun, jigsaw, penlight,
cdlular phone, ceramic crowbar-all hooked and holstered to her
webbing belt, hidden inside baggy paper refugee Suit. Equipment check
was a calm-ritual. She zipped the paper suit up to the neck, over
icr denim shorts and cotton T-shirt. She strapped on a plain white
antiseptic mask.
Then she cut off the clinic's electrical power.
Thermite sizzled briefly on the power pole overhead, and half the
city block went dark. Jane swore briefly inside her mask. Clearly
there had been some changes made lately in the Nuevo Laredo municipal
power grid. Jane Unger's first terrorist structure hit had turned Out
to be less than surgical.
"Not my fault," she muttered. Mexican power engineers were always
hacking around; and people stole city power too, all kinds of illegal
network linkups around here. . . . They called the hookups diablitos,
"little devils," another pretty apt name, considering that the world
was well on its way to hell. . . . Anyway, it wouldn't kill them to
repair one little outage.
Greg's thermite bomb had really worked. Every other week or so, Greg
would drop macho hints about his military background doing structure
hits. Jane had never quite believed him, before this.
Jane tied a pair of paper decontamination covers over her trail
boots. She cinched and knotted the boot covers tightly at the ankles,
then ghosted across the blacked-out street, puddles gleaming damply
underfoot. She stepped up three stone stairs, entered the now pitch-
black akove at the clinic's rear exit, and checked the street behind
her. No cars, no people, no visible witnesses... . Jane pulled a
translucent rain hood over her head, cinched and knotted it. Then she
peeled open a paper pack and pulled on a pair of tough plastic
surgical gloves.
She slapped the steel doorframc with the flat of her hand.
The clinic's door opened with a shudder.