"Charles Stross - The Boys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

The Boys
Charles Stross
The boys scuttled over the concrete slab like cockroaches, exoskeletons a dull
bronze in the orange glare that passed for daylight. A dense mist concealed rocks and ankles
and a corpse. The roar of a police carrier echoed through the trees, a pulsing racket of
authority: the boys didn't care. By the time the patrol arrived the corpse was brain dead,
stripped of eyes and kidneys and viscera as well as bionics. The boys had left their
incestuous joke with the corpse; a noose.
Darkness descended on the area, a protective screen for the armoured hovercraft as
it swept through the gap in the forest, cruising slowly between fungus-streaked biomass
modules. Among the video surfaces that lined the cabin the Hunter sat bolt upright; her
screens scintillated as she focussed on the partially-dismembered cadaver.
"Boys; He's been dead for half an hour." The constables flinched and whined; she
noticed them and moderated her voice. They were sensitive units, too valuable to waste.
"Nothing here," she told the autopilot. "Get the skull, then take us home."
The small noises of relief were drowned out by the roar of the fans. Some of the
cyborged dogs muttered and scratched their implants as the carrier turned and rumbled back
towards the castle. In the wake of the hovercraft the cobblestones were darker than before,
by an increment of congealing blood.
The castle, a cube with edges a kilometer long, shone with an ominous red glow that
filtered through the grime of centuries. The degenerate bioforms of the landscape twisted
away from the laser-veined monolith of lunar basalt; nerve-trees bubbled into fatty shapes
and acanthopods bristled as they crept past. The clouds above it reflected a red glow,
megawatts of energy expended in a display of power. The ceiling of the world, a continuation
of the floor, hung thirty kilometers overhead, masked by clouds: cylindrical storms and spiral
winds induced by convection from the algae-fogged solar windows were the predominant
weather pattern. The world existed in a soyuz-shell; TransLunar Seven, the Islamic
Revolutionary Shogunate, had seen better days.

The view from the incoming drifter would have been spectacular if anyone had
bothered to observe it. The pod closed in on the habitat slowly, waiting to be picked up by a
tug as it drifted past. Its self-sustaining ecosystem basked in the glare of sunlight close to the
sun, pulsing out a call sign to the tracking systems of the orbital city. At a range of a hundred
kilometers the orbital nation was a slowly rolling wall of grey metal and ceramic. Outlying
parabolic light farms provided a hook for the eye, stationary mylar mirrors focussed on
geodesic domes that could contain anything from algae tanks to laser cells. Thin stems of
plastic fastened them to the hub regions at either end of the colony. They were huge,
kilometers in diameter, as were the gigantic solar windows set into the wall of the world. The
drift pod was a bacillus approaching a dinosaur.
But the pod was bigger than any reptile, and carried a varied cargo of sentience.
There were the pod's native bionics and their supportive life-system, and more тАУ a human
cargo. Nike was a fully gender-identified female human; she had the right complement of
arms, legs and sensory organs, which was not mandatory. Coming from Troy-Jupiter, where
lots of things called themselves human, this was quite a surprise. But Nike wasn't bothering
about the scenery; she was worrying about customs.
"You're still set on going in?" asked the pod personna, an expert system that called
itself Valentin Zero.
"Maybe." Nike stared into inner space, mirrored contact lenses turning her eyelids
into projection screens for the video nodes in her optic nerves. "I may just go through with
this. I may. Just."