"Charles Stross - Scratch Monkey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Scratch Monkey
Charles Stross



1: Year Zero Man
As I fasten my crash webbing Sareena looks at me and shakes her head. "What is it?" I ask. She
pauses as she pre-checks the heat shield: she looks embarrassed.
"Do you have any last wishes?" she asks, stumbling over her words. "I mean, do you want me to
tell anyone if you ..?"
I grin up at her humourlessly. She's little more than a shadow cast by the glare of the floodlights,
so I can't see her expression. "What do you think?" I ask, hoping for something to distract me
from what's about to happen.
She straightens up and checks over the ejection rail another time. It's ancient, a history book
nightmare. Everything on this station is ancient: the planetary colony abandoned space travel,
along with most everything else, when they cut themselves off from contact centuries ago. Cold
and dark, the station was mothballed for centuries, until the we beamed in and reactivated it. Now
it has new owners, and a very different purpose to the one it was designed for. "Okay," she says
calmly. "So if you don't come back, you don't want anyone to cry ..."
"Not for me," I say, jerking a thumb over my shoulder towards the sealed airlock bay doors,
amber lights strobing across the danger zone to indicate pressure integrity. "But if I don't come
back, you can cry for the natives. Nobody else will."
"Yeah, well. Looks like the heat shield's good for one more trip, at least." She finishes with her
handheld scanner and hooks it to her utility belt, then turns and waves at the redlit Launch
Control room, high among the skeletal girders above us. "Does your your life support integrity
check out?"
"Check." A green helix coils slowly in the bottom left corner of my visual field, spiralling down
the status reading on my suit; more head-up displays wind past my other eye in a ruby glare of
countdown digits. The oxy pressure on my countercurrent infuser is fine but I have a tense feeling
like an itch. I can't breathe with my lungs. Got to make this reentry drop immersed in a bubble of
liquid. The decceleration on reentry is going to be ferocious.

The comm circuit comes to life: it's launch control. " Launch window opens in two hundred
seconds. You should make your modified orbital perigee in two seven nine
seconds at one-niner five kilometres. You'd better clear the bay, Sar."

"Okay." She shrugs. "Outer helmet?"
I nod clumsily and she lowers it into place over my head. I cut in my external sensors and sit tight
in the frame of the drop capsule, webbed in by refrigerant feeds. The thick aerated liquid gurgles
around my ears then begins to thicken into a gel. The pod's active stealth skin tests itself, flashing
chameleon displays at the wall. "All systems go," I tell her, voice distorted by the gunk clogging
my throat: "you tie one on for me, okay?" I smile, and she gives me a thumbs-up.

" You're go, Adjani," cuts in launch control; Helmut and Davud are in charge. We've been
through this all before: they sound professionally bored.

" Pressure drop in one-forty seconds, re-entry window in one-ninety and
counting. Repeat, Go for drop in two minutes."

"Check," Sareena calls over her shoulder, then stops for one last word. "Take care, Oshi," she