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

Another dot appears, drifting towards the target.

" Reagan here. Manifesto delivered. Stand by for adverse press coverage." EMP whites out the
display for a moment as a four megaton blast torches off, fifty kilometres from the target. Then everything
begins to happen very fast indeed.

"Bronstein here. Deploy canvassers." The drones up front are gearing up for launch, their short-range
thrusters loading the last of their fuel. I can hear the clanks and gurgles underfoot, overhead. Canvassers,
soliciting lethal opinions. "Party summit meeting, what does the chairman say?"

" Churchill here. The chairman thinks it is time for all good persons to come to the aid of the
party." Violet crosses begin to appear on the display, accelerating away from the thickest cluster of
attack ships. They multiply, turning an entire quadrant of the display purple. " Canvassers preparing to
doorstep the voter."

" Pol Pot's manifesto is delivered." The screen blinks again: another nuke pulses gamma radiation in the
vacuum.

" Kennedy here. The voter appears to be irritated. Alert! The voter appears to be getting ready to
move to another constituency!"

"Bronstein here. All parties, send out your canvassers now! Commence advertising saturation! Prepare to
gerrymander! We have an election campaign. I repeat: we have an election campaign!"

All hell breaks loose as the parties begin sending out canvassers. Each ship disgorges a stream of purple
hearts, rosettes, crosses: inbound drones falling towards the target starship. The enemy is helpless, unable
to move -- best estimates indicate it takes weeks to start up a black-hole powered space drive. There's
not a lot of point trying to follow the overall battle: it's too vast, too inchoate. The fleet mails out press
releases, decoy drones, in all directions. There must be two or three thousand powered entities out there.
So I lock into one of the on-board channels, palms damp, and watch over Lorma's shoulder.

A sea of silicon eyes stares up at Lorma as she drifts down towards the target. Perspective shatters the
illusion of scale: the intruder is huge, bigger than anything the mind can grasp. I watch through her eyes as
she sees the structure grow until it becomes a plain of iridescent poppies towards which she is falling. My
biotracers see her heart rate increase. Not a simulation, she subvocalises, a mantra for troubled times.

She is not alone. She looks up, zooms in a blaze of rangefinder digits and sees other silver snowflakes
descending towards the plain. In the distance a vast gout of purple fire lances into space, a jet as huge as
a solar flare. The ground is moving, but doppler radar tracks it at centimetres per second squared.

"I'm doorstepping the voter," calls Mik. We look round, see his location as an amber arrow winking into
a depression in the surface of the world. It seems to be moving faster now; Lorma blips her belly thruster
and the ground comes up and slams against her shock absorbers. It slides out from under her until she
dabs some quick setting goo across it, holding her in place.

"Me too!" she whispers into the comm circuit. "Anyone listening?"

"Me," I say. "You got company."

"Good."