"Karen Traviss - Wess'Har 01 - City of Pearl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Traviss Karen)

About the Author



Books by Karen Traviss
Prologue
2198 in the calendar of the gethes .

GOVERNMENT WOR

The bot was immune to the snow, and so was Aras. He watched it working its way across the surface of
the stone with a blind purpose that defied the ice. Words emerged behind it like droppings.

GOVERNMENT WORK IS

A little shaving of ice drifted down as the bot moved. It cut steadily into a block of stone so hard that
only an obsessive would have bothered to try to carve it, an odd choice of material in a construction
made otherwise of composites and alloys.

But the bot had no passions as far as Aras could see; its single-mindedness must have been by proxy for
its masters. As it finished gouging the last letter out of the stone, it executed a 90-degree turn, moved
down the supporting column to the ground and plopped into the snow to trundle away, trailing a wake of
parallel lines

GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK.

Aras mimicked the lettering, copying it into the unspoiled snow beside him with a steady claw. He
considered it, then brushed it away. What was "God"? And why did it care about government, especially
so far from home? They were just words. He was only beginning to come to terms with the gethes'
language, and many things still baffled him.

"Is that gethes?" asked the apprentice navigator. It was his first trip to the quarantine zone, and he was
suited and sealed against invisible dangers, those that would never again bother Aras. A slight tilt of the
navigator's head steered Aras's attention to a low platform on tracks, rumbling around the perimeter.
"They look like that?"

"Bot," said Aras, using the gethes word he had gleaned from transmissions. "A machine they sent ahead
of them to build a habitat. Some are fully intelligent. That one is not. It's a load-carrier." Aras stood up
and wandered into its path; it paused and corrected its course to avoid him. He blocked it a few more
times and then tired of the game. "It cannot distinguish me from a gethes."

The gethes were definitely coming. They had known that for a long time, from the first signal that was
intercepted, but they were imminent now. There had been a stream of data directed to the bots about the
first gethes' intentions and needs. Now Aras had satisfied his curiosity and allowed the habitat to begin to
take shape, and judged it was time to act.

He wandered through the growing compound unchallenged. There were no security measures to keep
him out; bots scattered from his path. But there was no damage he wished to do, nor information he