"James Swallow - Judge Dredd 4 - Eclipse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swallow James)

carbon dioxide filled the cramped little bed-sitting room, he found himself
desperately wishing, praying, pleading for just one more lungful of that
hated, loathsome air.


While Calvin and his neighbours choked to death, a different kind of
panic was rising in a frenzied tide on the streets outside the apartment
block. Ernesto Diaz did his best to hide beneath the counter in his corner
cafe and not wet his pants.

The morning had begun like any other. Ernesto had climbed down from
his Komfy-Koffin capsule bed in the roof space and rolled open the
shutters to declare Diaz's Hotties open for business. He'd had the usual
thin crowd of early risers and a few grey-faced workers on their way to the
zoom terminal that would take them into the city proper, off to toil in the
mines or the oxy cracking yards. By mid-morning, he had the mock-meat
sausages on the grill sizzling up a treat, and he was filling the dispensers
with synthi-mustard and thinking about the lunchtime rush; it started
then. He happened to look out the window, noting with studied disinterest
a lone Judge outside the vacant store near the pawn shop - she'd rousted a
couple of go-gangers and had them cuffed to a holding post. Ernesto
frowned. He didn't like those punks, but he had to admit they'd done him
a big favour by setting fire to the local branch of Luney Lunch.

Across the street from Diaz's store was a holographic billboard that was
forever on the fritz. This week it had been running a recruitment
advertisement for one of the ice mining concerns down in Clavius, but the
braying voice of the announcer choked off in mid-sentence and the screen
disintegrated into a storm of flickering pixels. Ernesto caught it out of the
corner of his eye and looked up. A new image appeared on the billboard
screen, a computer-generated cartoon character with a stylised moon for a
head. It winked - right at him, so it seemed - and spoke in a chatty,
conspiratorial manner. Every word the 'toon spoke was repeated in a
ticker-tape stream along the bottom of the screen.

"Hey friend," it began, and now Diaz was sure it was talking to him.
"Where do U go if U want 2 know what's up, up, up? Lemme tell U. Right
here! Right now! Listen up, up, up! Moon-U has all U need to know, no
matter what the Big Helmets say!" The little figure now sported a T-shirt
with the words "Moon-U" emblazoned on it, and he struck a comic pose as
a bumbling parody of a Luna City Judge ambled on screen. For a second,
Ernesto looked around and saw that everyone on the street had stopped
what they were doing to watch the billboard. From his vantage point at
the cafe counter, he could see the Moon-U cartoon appearing on another
public screen up at the Sagan Street crosswalk, and repeated here and
there in the windows of the discount electrical store and on the back of
some juve's telly-jacket.

"Shuddup!" drawled the caricature Judge in a thick Texas City accent,
listing back and forth as if he was drunk. "Ya little runt! I ain't lettin' you