"Charles Stross - Merchant princes 01 - The Family Trade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

PART 1
Pink Slip
WeatherMan

Ten and a half hours before a mounted knight with a machine gun tried to kill
her, tech journalist Miriam Beckstein lost her job. Before the day was out, her
pink slip would set in train a chain of events that would topple governments,
trigger civil wars, and kill thousands. It would be the biggest scoop in her
career, in any journalist's careerтАФ bigger than Watergate, bigger than 9/11тАФand
it would be Miriam's story. But as of seven o'clock in the morning, the story
lay in her future: All she knew was that it was a rainy Monday morning in
October, she had a job to do and copy to write, and there was an editorial
meeting scheduled for ten.
The sky was the colour of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain.
Miriam yawned and came awake to the Monday morning babble of the anchorman on
her alarm radio.
"тАФBombing continues in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in business news, the markets are
down forty-seven points on the
word that Cisco is laying off another three thousand employees," announced the
anchor. "Ever since 9/11, coming on top of the collapse of the dot-com sector,
their biggest customers are hunkering down. Tom, how does it look from where
you're sittingтАФ"
"Shut up," she mumbled and killed the volume. "I don't want to hear this." Most
of the tech sector was taking a beating. Which in turn meant that The Industry
Weatherman's, readersтАФventure capitalists and high-tech entrepreneurs, along
with the wannabe day tradersтАФwould be taking a beating. Her own beat, the
biotech firms, were solid, but the collapsing internet sector was making waves.
If something didn't happen to relieve the plummeting circulation figures soon,
there would be trouble.
Trouble. Monday. "I'll give you trouble," she muttered, face forming a grin that
might have frightened some of those readers, had they been able to see it.
'Trouble is my middle name." And trouble was good news, for a senior reporter on
The Industry Weatherman.
She slid into her bathrobe, shivering at the cold fabric, then shuffled along
stripped pine boards to the bathroom for morning ablutions and two minutes with
the electric toothbrush. Standing before the bathroom mirror under the merciless
glare of the spotlights, she shivered at what she saw in it: every minute of her
thirty-two years, in unforgiving detail. "Abolish Monday mornings and Friday
afternoons," she muttered grimly as she tried to brush some life into her
shoulder-length hair, which was stubbornly black and locked in a vicious rear-
guard action against the ochre highlights she bombarded it with on a weekly
basis. Giving up after a couple of minutes, she fled downstairs to the kitchen.
The kitchen was a bright shade of yellow, cosy and immune to the gloom of autumn
mornings. Relieved, Miriam switched on the coffee percolator and made herself a
bowl of granolaтАФwhat Ben had always called her rabbit-food breakfast.
Back upstairs, fortified by an unfeasibly large mug of coffee, she had to work
out what to wear. She dived into her
closet and found herself using her teeth to tear the plastic bag off one of the
three suits she'd had dry-cleaned on FridayтАФonly to discover it was her black