"Peter Watts - A Niche" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage,
and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses
and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of
internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.
It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea;
the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries
to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision
blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.
She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream.
The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke
falls writhing into the abyss.

They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing,
into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at
the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb
4 Peter Watts

across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand
over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading
from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled
structures in perpetual twilight.
They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided
them here.
"I'll never get used to it," Ballard grates in a caricature of her
usual voice.
Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. "Thirty four
Centigrade." The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so
wrong to talk without breathing.
Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light.
After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.
There's so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here
the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes;
seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful
centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy,
here at Dragon's Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some
insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.
Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows
what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of
boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed
between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace
the water with milky veils.
The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.
It doesn't sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp
string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming,
through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:
"LENIEтАФ"
Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth
that seems impossibly huge.
Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares
into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny dispassionate