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

successive orbital passes of a KH-11 satellite. They
were timed precisely eighty-nine minutes apart.
This village was the home of a noted Mujahedin
leader. Note the similar footprint to the payloads
on the load beds of the trucks seen at the 1962
parade.

These indicators were present, denoting the
presence of servitor units in use by Soviet forces in
Afghanistan: the four metre wide gauge of the
assimilation track. The total molecular breakdown
of organic matter in the track. The speed of
destruction -- the event took less than five
thousand seconds to completion, no survivors were
visible, and the causative agent had already been
uplifted by the time of the second orbital pass.
This, despite the residents of the community being
armed with DShK heavy machine guns, rocket
propelled grenade launchers, and AK-47's. Lastly:
there is no sign of the causative agent even
deviating from its course, but the entire area is
depopulated. Except for excarnated residue there
is no sign of human habitation.

In the presence of such unique indicators, we have
no alternative but to conclude that the Soviet
Union has violated the Dresden Agreement by
deploying GOLD JULY BOOJUM in a combat mode
in the Khyber pass. There are no grounds to
believe that a NATO armoured division would have
fared any better than these mujahedin without
nuclear support ...

Puzzle Palace

Roger isn't a soldier. He's not much of a patriot, either: he signed up with
the CIA after college, in the aftermath of the Church Commission
hearings in the early seventies. The Company was out of the assassination
business, just a bureaucratic engine rolling out National Security
assessments: that's fine by Roger. Only now, five years later, he's no
longer able to roll along, casually disengaged, like a car in neutral
bowling down a shallow incline towards his retirement, pension and a
gold watch. He puts the file down on his desk and, with a shaking hand,
pulls an illicit cigarette from the pack he keeps in his drawer. He lights it


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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross

and leans back for a moment to draw breath, force relaxation, staring at