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

had been major changes unnoted by the immigrant processing module over the past two
centuries. A faint rumble drifted from the distance, menacing in the twilight as the colony
headed towards nightfall.
The videomice were the eyes and ears of the shogunate, but there were too many of
them to monitor simultaneously. Nike ignored them, relying on the prickling of her neck to tell
her when one of them was belching a coded data packet to the castle: her close-cropped hair
was wired for microwaves. She guessed that there were other watchers in the forest, other
eyes, and it worried her. System traffic control had confirmed that no-one had visited the
colony for a good six years now, and no-one had left it for over two decades. If anyone
human was left alive, Nike would be the subject of intense scrutiny. She stumbled
occasionally and paused to brush branches out of her way as she followed the trail. She was
right; other eyes were watching her.

Boys drifted like ghosts, moving in silence across the open spaces. Their
choreography was uncanny, plotted by computer for a ballet corps of cyborgs. The ground
beneath their feet was a bare surface of white ceramic that curved away to either side until it
submerged beneath a layer of earth; it was the naked hull, exposed by erosion. Every ten
metres a grey pole stood, festooned with branching sensors and small pumps, a trellis left
over from the soil-support system. Ecological vandalism had stripped it bare in this area, a
kilometer-wide strip of sterility near the equator. Darkness had fallen across it an hour ago
and the people of the night were rising.
The Hunter watched them on a screen in the safety of the castle. Reclining in a
throne of skulls festooned with nutrient tubes and neural jacks, she looked superficially akin
to those she observed; pale, with the fleshlessness of a rapidly-growing child and the
synthetic skin of the ageless. The resemblance was due purely to design convergence. The
Hunter тАУ her title was as good as her name тАУ was not a boy. To be a boy was to be a warrior,
and the Hunter was hardly a warrior. She was a Hunter тАУ of boys.
"What are they doing now?" The voice came from above and behind her head. She
watched the screen with the intensity of a sniper.
"They appear to be constructing something ..." The Hunter paused to consult her
throne of brains. "A gallows."
"Why?"
The Hunter thought for a while. "It's an archaic device used for punitive purposes.
The victim is suspended by a rope for some time тАУ it looks uncomfortable. Possibly
dangerous if no spinal bypass is installed."
"Who is the subject of this device?" The voice sounded bored. It probably knew
already and was testing her.
"That's not clear, yet."
"Keep me informed." The voice vanished as rapidly as it had manifested itself, and
the Hunter shuddered. She had a morbid fear of that voice, conditioned by a century of
ignorance. No-one had met the Shogun face to face and told the tale within living memory.
Her memory. The Shogun was an enigma. It might not even exist, and what could be more
terrible than that? To serve a fiction for a century ...
The twilight ritual of the boys played itself out. One of their own, out on the white
plain, was stripped of his exoskeleton; they bound his hands behind his back with a cord of
red silk. It was impossible to tell if he struggled тАУ those who surrounded him were too strong
for unamplified muscles to resist. Up went the rope, the prisoner on the polished teakwood
scaffold, the drop ... the Hunter watched, fascinated. Centripetal acceleration dragged the
twitching feet out. There's something nasty about this, she realized, as infrareds observed the
body cooling. The boys left an hour before she admitted to herself that what she'd witnessed