"Charles Stross - Rogue Farm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited for waterlogged black crumbs
to float to the surface before taking it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.

"Bugger," she remarked.

"You feel trapped?" Joe asked. Again? He wondered.

Maddie grunted evasively. "Not your fault, love. Just life."

"Life." Joe sniffed, then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose. "Life!"

"Horizon's closing in," she said quietly. "Need a change of horizons."

"Ayup, well, rust never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven't I?" said
Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away: "got a shipment of fertilizer
coming in."

###

In between milking the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and
surruptitiously EMPing every police 'bot on the farm into the silicon afterlife, it took Joe a
couple of days to get round to running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked
and whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it ran up the gadgets he'd
ordered -- a modified crop sprayer with double-walled tanks and hoses, an air rifle with
a dart loaded with a potent cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask
with its own oxygen supply.

Maddie made herself scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing
during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl, exhausted, into bed.
She didn't seem to be having nightmares, which was a good sign: Joe kept his questions
to himself.
It took another five days for the smallholding's power field to concentrate enough juice
to begin fueling up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house off-net in
the most deniable and surruptitiously plausible way, a bastard coincidence of
squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the
wireless chit-chat. He'd half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn't say anything:
just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower Gruntlingthorpe or wherever
she'd taken to holing up.

Finally, the tank was filled. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armour, picked up his
weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the pond.

The woods around the pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming
copse of old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill, smaller
shrubs nestling at their ankles in a greenskirt that reached all the way to the
almost-stagnant waters. A little stream fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of
a weeping willow; children had played here, pretending to explore the wilderness
beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental control cameras.

That had been long ago. Today the woods really were wild. No kids, no picnicing city