"Charles Stross - Antibodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

of execution is a bad place to have children."

I chuckledтАФthen the laughter froze inside me. "Don't look round. We're being
tracked."

"Uh-huh. I'm not armed. You?"

"It didn't seem like a good idea." If you were questioned or detained by police or
officials, being armed can easily turn a minor problem into a real mess. And if the
police or officials had already been absorbed by a hard take-off, nothing short of a
backpack nuke and a dead man's handle will save you. "Behind us, to your left,
traffic surveillance camera. It's swivelling too slowly to be watching the buses."

"I wish you hadn't told me."

The pavement was really crowded: it was one of the busiest shopping streets in
Scotland, and on a Saturday morning you needed a cattle prod to push your way
through the rubbernecking tourists. Lots of foreign kids came to Scotland to learn
English. If I was right, soon their brains would be absorbing another high-level
language: one so complex that it would blot out their consciousness like a sackful of
kittens drowning in a river. Up ahead, more cameras were watching us. All the shops
on this road were wired for video, wired and probably networked to a police station
somewhere. The complex ebb and flow of pedestrians was still chaotic, though,
which was cause for comfort: it meant the ordinary population hadn't been infected
yet.

Another half mile and we'd reach the railway station. Two hours on a local train,
switch to a bus service, forty minutes further up the road, and we'd be safe: the
lifeboat would be submerged beneath the still waters of a loch, filling its fuel tanks
with hydrogen and oxygen in readiness for the burn to orbit and pick-up by the ferry
that would transfer us to the wormhole connecting this world-line to home's baseline
reality. (Drifting in high orbit around Jupiter, where nobody was likely to stumble
across it by accident.) But first, before the pick-up, we had to clear the surveillance
area.

It was commonly believedтАФby some natives, as well as most foreignersтАФthat the
British police forces consisted of smiling unarmed bobbies who would happily offer
directions to the lost and give anyone who asked for it the time of day. While it was
true that they didn't routinely walk around with holstered pistols on their belt, the rest
of it was just a useful myth. When two of them stepped out in front of us, Eve
grabbed my elbow. "Stop right there, please." The one in front of me was built like a
rugby player, and when I glanced to my left and saw the three white vans drawn up
by the roadside I realized things were hopeless.

The cop stared at me through a pair of shatterproof spectacles awash with the light
of a head-up display. "You are Geoffrey Smith, of 32 Wardie Terrace, Watford,
London. Please answer."

My mouth was dry. "Yes," I said. (All the traffic cameras on the street were turned
our way. Some things became very clear: police vans with mirror-glass windows.