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

emerging from it looks about right. I'm abruptly glad that there's no way she can tell I'm watching over
her shoulder; I get a nasty voyeuristic itch from it, something that makes me feel unclean. "What do you
want to know?"

"Nothing new," I say. "See you later." I drop briefly back through my own skin, uncomfortable and itchy
in free fall. I wonder for a moment if she really did upload before the incident in the medicentre, or
whether she has some reason for not wanting to talk about it. But this isn't the time or place for
distractions. I'm ready to dive back into Lorma's proxybody. Things are distinctly odd.

Something or other seems to be preventing the hot gas mix from breaking out into the vacuum-filled
sections of the tunnel; something impalpable to telefactor senses. Round the bend there's a heat source,
shrouded from view by a foggy condensate of water vapour. The tunnel widens; Lorma is clinging to a
surface rather than bracing herself between walls. There's a regular chirruping noise, almost like a
grasshopper the size of a --

Lorma bounces a radar pulse off the surfaces ahead, then opens fire. A scorching flash of laserlight drills
a black line across the ceiling and down to the floor, bisecting the heat source neatly. A sudden slew of
systems data smears across her optical displays. "Hostile propaganda!"

Her drone is standing near the widest point of a spindle-shaped chamber, narrowing to another tunnel at
the opposite end. Some kind of structure is situated in the middle, rooted at floor and ceiling. She's hit it.
"What," she says; then there's a mournful organ-pipe roar that seems to enclose us in a physical grip. It
rattles her telefactor body like a pea in a pod. The world flips over lazily, landing her on top of Parveen,
who grabs her with three spare legs. Everything is confused for a while.

"That must be the thing that keeps the atmosphere in," Parveen says. "We're in a natural venturi ... " The
concealing fog tumbles in shreds, to reveal a cylindrical object, badly scarred by laserheat.

" Oh shit," says Lorma. "I've started a blowout." She sounds cut up about it, and well she might. There's
no way of telling how critical the atmosphere is to internal functioning in the ship. We don't want to
damage it. The turbulence begins to die away. She tries to use her sonar; oddly, it works. Air pressure is
stabilising.

"Hey," she says. "Sonar's working. Which means."

Parveen: "We've been cut off. Onwards and inwards, no? It's the only way to go."
"I agree," I say, intervening. "Comm traffic is holding up. The coder is in place. As soon as we can isolate
a control interface to plug the fat pipe into --"

"Understood."

But we're eight light-seconds from Pascal. And how long will it take us to figure out an interface
protocol? There's no rule to say that the control space or architecture of an Ultrabright expansion
processor will resemble anything we know about.

I hop channels, looking for more trouble. I can't feel my body; I'm a ghost in the telepresence wires,
unable to localise myself. After a few false tries I find something interesting: Mik.

Mikhail scans a full circle around his sensor turret. Ahead of him the passage he's in diverges into three
prongs, two of them descending towards the core of the alien ship. Veins and ropes of blue light flutter