"Charles Stross - A Colder War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

maintenance types -- but subdued and nervous looking. They're afloat in a
bubble of pressurized air wedged against the underside of the Antarctic
ice sheet: below them stretch the still, supercooled waters of Lake Vostok.

They're waiting for a rendezvous.

"Five hundred yards,'' reports one of the techs. "Rising on ten.'' His
companion nods. They're waiting for the men in the midget sub drilling
quietly through three miles of frigid water, intruders in a long-drowned
tomb. "Have 'em back on board in no time.'' The sub has been away for
nearly a day; it set out with enough battery juice for the journey, and
enough air to keep the crew breathing for a long time if there's a system
failure, but they've learned the hard way that fail-safe systems aren't. Not
out here, at the edge of the human world.

Roger shuffles some more. "I was afraid the battery load on that cell you
replaced would trip an undervoltage isolator and we'd be here 'til Hell
freezes over,'' the sub driver jokes to his neighbour.

Looking round, Roger sees one of the marines cross himself. "Have you
heard anything from Gorman or Suslowicz?'' he asks quietly.

The lieutenant checks his clipboard. "Not since departure, sir,'' he says.
"We don't have comms with the sub while it's submerged: too small for
ELF, and we don't want to alert anybody who might be, uh, listening.''

"Indeed.'' The yellow hunchback shape of the midget submarine appears
at the edge of the radiance shed by the floodlights. Surface waters
undulate, oily, as the sub rises.



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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross

"Crew transfer vehicle sighted,'' the driver mutters into his mike. He's
suddenly very busy adjusting trim settings, blowing bottled air into ballast
tanks, discussing ullage levels and blade count with his number two. The
crane crew are busy too, running their long boom out over the lake.

The sub's hatch is visible now, bobbing along the top of the water: the
lieutenant is suddenly active. "Jones! Civatti! Stake it out, left and
centre!'' The crane is already swinging the huge lifting hook over the sub,
waiting to bring it aboard. "I want eyeballs on the portholes before you
crack this thing!'' It's the tenth run -- seventh manned -- through the eye of
the needle on the lake bed, the drowned structure so like an ancient
temple, and Roger has a bad feeling about it. We can't get away with this
forever, he reasons. Sooner or later ...

The sub comes out of the water like a gigantic yellow bath toy, a cyborg