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

part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and
teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she
wonders.
Then the pain reaches her.
A Niche 5

She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature
thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into
chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.
She goes limp. Please get it over with if you're going to kill me
just please God make it quickтАФ She feels the urge to vomit, but the
'skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won't let her.
She shuts out the pain. She's had plenty of practice. She pulls
inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far
away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic.
There's another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife
тАФyou know, a knife, like the one you've got strapped to your leg
and completely forgot aboutтАФand suddenly the monster is gone,
its grip broken.
Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It's like operating a
marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat
with something as big as she is. Only тАФ Ballard is tearing it to
pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark
icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with
smoke-trails of suspended gore.
The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen
smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass.
Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.
Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in
her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her
arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any
trouble. I've had worse, she thinks.
Then: Why am I still alive?
Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like
photophores themselves.
"Jesus Christ," Ballard says in a distorted whisper. "Lenie?
You okay?"
Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But
surprisingly, she feels intact. "Yeah."
And if not, she knows, it's her own damn fault. She just lay
there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.
She's always asking for it.
6 Peter Watts

Back in the airlock, the water recedes around them. And
within them; Clarke's stolen breath, released at last, races back
along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.
Ballard splits the face seal on her 'skin and her words tumble
into the wetroom. "Jesus. Jesus! I don't believe it! My God, did
you see that thing! They get so huge around here!" She passes her