"Walter Jon Williams - City on Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

And once exiled, once that leap has been taken, where else is there to
go?Caraqui. Where the New City, consigned to ashes years ago, might undergo
an unscheduled rebirth.
Caraqui. Where her future waits.
Assuming, of course, it waits anywhere.
LORDS OF THE NEW CITY BREAKS RECORDS THIRD SMASH WEEKEND FOR BIO-CHROMOGravity
tugs at Aiah's inner ear as the InterMet brakes, drops out of the system,
comes with a hum of electromagnets to a stop at the platform. A banner
splashed with red letters hangs against a bright mosaic on the back of the
platform.
Welcome to Free Caraq . . . The last letters are obscured by the banner's
dangling upper corner, come loose and fallen across the message.
And that's it. There is no one on the platform, just the message on the
banner.
Somehow Aiah had expected more.
Pneumatics hiss as the car's doors swing open. The other two occupants
disembark. Aiah rises, takes her bag from the overhead rack, and carries it
out onto the platform. The bag is lightтАФshe had left all her belongings
behind as she fled, and only bought a few things in Gunalaht on her way.
There is only one heavy thing in her bag, a book, red plastic leatherette
binding with gilt letters. Her legacy to her new home.
As she walks past the mosaic she realizes that it's political, a noble-looking
man wearing a kind of uniform and gazing off into the far distance. My father
made the political revolution, it promises. / will make the economic
revolution.
Covered now by the banner of the real revolution.
She doesn't know precisely who the figure on the mosaic is supposed to be, but
she knows it has to be one of the Kere-maths, the family that had ruled
Caraqui for generations. The promise of economic revolution had been a
lieтАФduring their years of power the Keremaths ruled by kleptocracy, a
government by gangsters bent on looting their own economy, their own people.
They were mostly dead now, the Keremaths. Constantine's revolution had killed
them, and it had been Aiah who had, against every law, given Constantine the
plasm necessary to accomplish their destruction.
It is a matter of more than casual interest to discover how grateful
Constantine will prove. Especially as she now has nothing to offer him, and
gratitude is all she can expect.
The book in Aiah's bag bangs against her hip as she walks down a short
corridor lined with advertsтАФfamiliar posters for the new Lynxoid Brothers
chromoplay, the Inter-Metropolitan Lottery, Gulman Shoes ("Meet for the
Street"), all alongside more exotic promotions for Sea Mage Motor Craft and
the New Theory Hydrogen Company. Then suddenly she's out of the tunnel and
into the main body of the station, and her heart leaps as she sees armored
soldiers with their guns out, sets of goggled eyes gazing at her.
Mercenaries, she thinks, because half of them have the black skins of the
veteran Cheloki exiles who have been following Constantine for years.
The masked eyes pass over Aiah without pause. They're not interested in
arrivals. They're clustered around the departure platforms.
They're interested in people trying to escape.
There are counters for customs officials to interview arriving passengers, but