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

As darkness fell, the twittering code-pulses from the videomice quietened down;
Valentin tuned in on the steady, low-powered grumble of the neuroplants, the tok-tokking of a
factory talking to its robots, the muffled crackling of poorly-shielded bionics hooked into the
soil-support system. The microwave traffic was richer and more compressed than sonic
communication, echoing back and forth along the eighty-kilometer cylinder. But Valentin was
listening for a single delicate pulse-train; the side-band transmission from Nike's eyeballs.
This situation interested him, inasmuch as anything could hold his attention these
days; the ins and outs of betrayal, of wheels within wheels and subordinates who were
superiors. Valentin Zero was an expert system wired for espionage, and his current mission
was to monitor Nike. She was so old as to be almost obsolete: old enough to have been here
before. His sensorium ghosted through winds of data тАУ the life-blood of even the most
seriously injured orbital republic тАУ until he finally locked onto a signal that looked right. It was
faint, but the sophisticated coding matched his key; he locked on and submerged in the
transmission, saw what Nike was seeing.
The wall of the house caved in soundlessly, blood spurting from severed arteries
buried in the walls, followed by a soundless spasm as the floor shuddered and died. A
release of sphincters flooded the food trough. A boy stepped through a great ragged rent in
front of her; his left arm was coated to the elbow with a smooth sheen of gore, the chainsaw
semi-retracted and murderous. His bronze exoskeleton exposed white skin and atrophied
genitals, a wildly ecstatic smile of welcome beneath a cowlick of brown hair. The running
lights on his spinal carapace were blinking green and violet pips, as membranes slid down
across Nike's eyes and a targeting display flashed a red crosshair surrounded by flickering
digits across his face.
"Hello," he said, and tittered. Ben sat where he was, very still, eyes narrowed; Nike
felt her perception compress into a point on the boy's forehead, a point that could be made to
explode.
"Hello," she replied. The boy frowned, as if disappointed.
"You're not scared," he complained, "and you're not dead. What are you?" He pouted
with a transsexual sullenness that struck her as grotesquely old-fashioned.
"I'm a visitor," she replied. "What are you?"
"I'm a Boy," he said, smiling suddenly; "I've come тАУ "
"He's come to negotiate their surrender," said Ben. The boy flared again, mercurially
angry.
"You shut up, old man! That's for me to tell. It's not true, anyway."
Ben shut up, his face blank. Nike felt as if solid ground was dissolving beneath her
feet. She'd pegged Ben as a non-participant, but this boy seemed to know something that
she didn't.
"What have you got to tell me?" she asked, itching with unease.
"Merely to enquire after your health and your diplomatic patronage," said the boy,
sniffing disdainfully. With a distinct lack of theatrical presence he sniffed and scratched under
one armpit. "But the old man of the monolith's got to you already, I see!"
"The monolith?" she asked, tracking Ben with her peripheral vision. He sat as still as
a rock.
"The castle ... the claw of the Shogun. We've been trying to get him to shut down the
Hunter for decades, haven't we?" The boy glanced at Ben pointedly; Ben rocked slowly back
and forth. The boy grimaced. "Observe the Shogun: theoretical ruler of the world, patron of
the ongoing revolution, supreme systems authority of the dreamtime, etcetera. We've been
trying to get him to do his job since he ran away fifty years ago."
"Why?" she asked, wondering to whom she should address the question.
"Because I'm not ready to let the boys do what they were designed to do," said Ben,