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

"Down," says someone else. A chorus starts, spiders ululating at the fleet that is taking evasive action a
hundred kilometers overhead. I have't seen any shooting yet but it's only a matter of time. I find it strange
to realise that we're all actually inside those ships, prisoners of our meat machines: nobody is down here,
nobody but these drone bodies through which our senses feed. Small satellites are deployed around the
alien starship to relay our comms. Lorma orients herself -- no, she orients her proxy body -- and pulls
down an overlay in our visual field; a map of the surface, as seen by the r-sats. She is on the equator.
There is an anomalous patch not far away.

In the distance another drone is visible, closing with us. Zoom resolution shows a name printed beneath
its menacing mandibular array; PARVEEN. "Parveen," says Lorma, and the white noise on the comm
circuit changes.

"Ack?"

"Follow me in."

"Check." They work with the terse ease of long practice. I wonder how long they've spent in the
Dreamtime, rehearsing these moves. I follow Lorma's sensorium, while in my viewfield I note that all
twenty of Bronstein's canvassers are down. Everyone but Boris and myself. All forces committed. Even
though the intruder has begun to fire its main drive, we have a toe-hold.

There is a burnished slab of blue metal set into the hull of the Ultrabright ship. Lorma pauses at the edge,
then strains with her buttocks as if to defecate. (I twitch uncomfortably: how far does this sensory
synergy go? ) A spiderbomb plops out of the dispenser, grabs hold of the ground and pulls itself along,
emitting a tenuous vapour trail. As it reaches the centre of the patch it detonates. The hexagonal patch
seems to evaporate, as if it has been completely disrupted by the local damage. Below it there is a
yawning darkness.
"Shit," Parveen says tensely. "What's down there?"

"Going to find out." Another spiderbomb rolls out. This time it drifts to the middle of the entrance and
flares. Magnesium light casts sharp-edged shadows across an empty cavity with tunnels leading off.
"There's nothing in it!" Lorma exclaims. "Looks like some kind of maintenance space. Going in."

"Ack." Lorma throws a sucker at the far wall of the cavity, waits for it to grab hold, then reels herself in
on a micro-fine fullerene cable. For an endless, breathless moment I feel her surrogate body hanging in an
abyss, floating in a free-fall womb within the armoured monstrosity; then tele-reality clamps down again
and I'm just there, following the assault on an alien spacecraft as a disembodied passenger in her senses.

The skin of the craft is thick and vascular, full of wide passages and random tunnels, fractally accreted.
Everything seems to have grown in incredibly intricate organic forms; the determinants of chaos. Lorma
pulls herself down towards the floor and grips it with all six feet. A shadow falls; Parveen descending, a
fearsome array of laser mirrors extended from her abdomen.

"Look," Lorma says. "Do we go horizontal or vertical?"

"Vertical," suggests Parveen. "That way to the control structures."

"Affirmative," I add, making myself known. "Go lateral."