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

"That's good." He looks thoughtful. "But I wouldn't be too sure."

"Why?" My heart's in my mouth, I'm edgy with the butterly stomach of an adrenalin rush in free fall.

"Watch --" he hoses me down with wisdom. Schemata, critical path analyses, clinically plotted
intersections from his side of the strategic planning. "I think we'll make it. Assuming your controllers
haven't planted a time bomb, some kind of sabotage mechanism --"

"They've done it before." I remember Miramor Dubrovnic, tricked into immolation by a Superbright ruse.
"They're not going to relish a starship full of rogue humans spreading the news about what they've been
up to among their affluent trading partners." I grab a dangling belt and pull myself over. Boris hangs like a
spider in free fall, a spider wearing a vac suit liner and EVA boots.

"The Superbrights sent you to check things out." He's cool.
"And that is all." I look away. "I told you, I want out. I'm not some kind of loyal drone." I shudder,
suddenly dropped back into a memory I wish I could forget -- the Boss, demonic and supercilious,
picking me up and squeezing with that look on his face that said, clear as day, you are nothing to me.
"They forfeited my loyalty when they sent me here. As far as my Boss is concerned I'm disposable. A
scratch monkey, he said."

"Want to expand on that?" He tries to hide a sudden sharp interest. I don't need to see him to hear it.

"I have had doubts." I look back at him. "Worse, I listened to the other side. We did things that no one
liked to talk about. Way back, all it summed was positive; the game was to engineer and maintain the
afterlife. But ... I've seen things. Things I can't talk about." I swallow. My throat is dry and I don't think I
can tell Boris any more, because the censors the Boss placed in my hindbrain are grumbling in their sleep
and threatening to wake up and blast me with nightmares if I continue. Smoke and mirrors, smoke of
humans burning. ( Ivan, my Ivan, long lost to a mushrooming roil of fallout because of one of the
Boss's schemes ...) "If you think we can zap the intruders then that's cool by me. I don't care if they're
Ultrabrights or something else. I don't much care what happens afterwards as long as I don't have to go
back to serve them. I just want to find somewhere safe to learn to be myself. What more can anyone ask
for? Can you tell me that?"

I can't talk any more.

"Let me tell you a story," offers Boris. He glances at the door. Taking its cue, the door slides shut.
"Animal."

"Squeep?" The noise comes from something small, slotted under the main dumb-board emergency
console. Something furry.

"Take a rain check."

The thing scoots back into one of the maintenance drone access tunnels, too narrow for human access.
"Been living in the Duat, under Anubis' thumb, for fifteen years," he says tiredly. "Do you know why?"

I look at him. He's bald, stocky, double-chinned, not incredibly handsome. Brown, soft eyes. He looks
nice in a way I don't understand ... as if he's never tried to make anything of himself, never tried to turn
his life into a statement or a crisis --