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

just under the skin, which pulses gently in time with it. As if he's in a tunnel under a reservoir of luminance,
and a thin puncture in the wall would drown him in flashbulb brightness. Some kind of optical storage
system, I guess. So something in here needs light?

"Mik: anyone seen any recognisable structures yet? Or anything?"

He scuttles forwards towards the central tunnel as he waits for a reply. The hissing in his ears seemed to
be louder --

"Parveen here. We zapped some kind of structure, localised a blow-out, but no life. No joy. All it seems
to have done is alerted a local subsystem to take care of the leak. Any ideas?"

"Ack. I'm going deeper." With full-three-sixty degree vision nothing can sneak up on him. He continues
his downward slide, pausing every twenty metres to listen to the walls. The tunnel twists in a crazy
corkscrew around a hidden axis, so that the bends are constantly concealed from view. "There's got to
be a better way than this! "That central axis. I wonder what's inside?"

Before I can object, he ejects two spiderbombs and sends them scuttling along the tunnel in opposite
directions. Then he sits down, glues his feet in position, and listens.

Echoes reverberate through the wall, which is thin and rigid; echoes and the ping! of something
expanding or contracting under the influence of heat. Mikhail zaps a sample into his mass analyser. More
nanostructures, fullerene-anchored molecular-scale robotics. This lot look like interpreters, synthetic
ribosomes specialised to construct components of nanomachines. They're all dead. It used to be a
nanofactory: now it's bone. "Found structural tissue," he says. He unslings his tool pack and selects a drill
bit. It whines and spins itself into red heat before the wall gives, churning a small whirlwind of fragments
into the tunnel. He anchors himself by bracing a pair of legs against the roof of the tunnel.

Suddenly there's a brilliant flash of blue-green light and a hiss that nearly saturates his sonar. Paydirt.
"Gotcha!" he shouts over open circuit. "In the walls!"

"What --"

"Who said that?"

"-- Clear the channel!" he adds. "It's standard high-bandwidth silicate optics. Probably a backup circuit.
Light's pulsing ..."

Even as he speaks the light begins to die, plunging the tunnel into darkness. He steps up his
optoamplifiers and looks at it. I don't know what it means to him; to me it looks weird. Stringy, glutinous,
muscle-like fibres that are translucent, fluorescing with an ugly light in his UV gaze. Whatever it is it has
weird phase characteristics.

"Zoom, please," I say.

"Looks like the real thing!"

"Explain?" That's not me: that's Nikita, a sallow-faced engineer I barely know.

"High temperature high bandwidth cybernetics," he says. "I've seen it before ... used where