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

says. "We'll miss you."
"So will I," I say, feeling like a hollow woman as the wise-crack comes out. She half-reaches out
toward me, but doesn't quite make it: she pulls back instead, and jogs towards the access hatch. I
track her with the capsule sensors, testing the image filters we yesterday. Seen by the light of
radio emissions her skeleton is a hot synthetic pink overlaid with luminous green flesh and a thin
blue spiderweb of nanotech implants just beneath the skin. It could have been her, I tell myself,
trying to imagine myself retreating through that door and sealing it on her; it didn't have to be me.
All right, so I volunteered. So why have second thoughts at this stage? The Boss said it's
important, so I suppose it must be. There's a very important job to be done and then I'm going to
come back okay, no doubt about it. It's going to be good --

" One minute, Adjani. Any last words?"
"Yeah," I say. Suddenly my mouth is dry. "This is --"
The lights on the bay wall flash into a blinding red glare and a spume of vapour forms whirlpools
around the air vent: the clam-shell door is opening onto space, draining out the frail pool of air.

" Pulling sockets, Adjani. Good ... "
I don't get to hear the rest. The launch rail kicks me in the small of the back and the head-up
display blanks out the starscape in a blaze of tracking matrices. When my eyeballs unsquash I
erase the unnecessary read-outs and take a look. The planet is a vast, ego-numbing blueness into
which I'm falling. I re-run the mission profile as the orientation thrusters cut in, spinning the drop
capsule so that I'm racing backwards into a sea of swirling gas at Mach thirty. The capsule is
going to make an unpowered re-entry like a meteor; it's designed to pull fifty gees of deceleration
on the way down (far more than any sane pilot would dream of), shedding fiery particles like a
stone out of heaven. This is going to happen in about three minutes time.
I'm busy for a few seconds, heart in my mouth as I scan for search radar and missile launches, but
no-one's detected me and by the time I can look up the black-surfaced station is invisible against
the thin scattering of stars above me. I could almost be alone out here -- but I'm not, quite.
Someone is down there: someone dangerous. Otherwise Distant Intervention wouldn't have seen
fit to send a team through the system Gatecoder, fifteen light-years from anywhere else;
otherwise it wouldn't have rated a visit of any kind, let alone the attention of a Superbright like
the Boss. Because if nobody lives here, why the hell is it pumping out so many uploaded minds
that it distorts Dreamtime processing throughout the entire sector?
A Year Zero event, that's what. I'm told we've run across this sort of thing before, but rarely, less
than once a century in the whole wide spread of human settlement; and that's why I'm here.
That's why everyone's afraid I'm not coming back ...
From the second when the pod first drops below orbital velocity to the moment it penetrates the
stratopause and deploys wings, there's not a lot for me to do. That's only about two minutes, but it
feels like forever: I'm suspended in a tank of high pressure liquid, feeling my bones grate under
the huge stresses of deceleration.
I run my test routines, muscles tensing, relaxing, counting down the milliseconds to landing: the
green helix spins in my left eye, pacing out the moments. While my body is in spasm I call up the
wisdom download they gave me, a huge database of predigested memories sitting in the implants
that thread my brain. It's full of details about the planets population, and I go over them -- got to
check my knowledge, even though I already know it a thousand times over -- as the first wisps of
atmosphere tear at the rim of my heat shield. When I begin to feel heavy I switch off my inner
ears and follow the g-forces on a display; New Salazar makes for daunting reading.

New Salazar: