"Peter F. Hamilton - The Nano flower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

which left him partially paralyzed down his right side. Her mother had been gang-raped, a trauma
she never recovered from. They were middle-aged middle-class suburbanite innocents, well-to-dos
who couldn't believe what was happening to their green and pleasant England, and didn't know how
to stop it.
The only reason Suzi had been there when it happened was because the PSP had shut down Welbeck
College, the British Army's officer cadet boarding school. A military career was all she had
wanted for as long as she could remember.
THE NANO FLOWER
3
An ambition subtly reinforced by her slightly disreputable maternal grandfather who spun enticing
stories of glory and honour back in the days when he'd served in the Falkiands and the Gulf.
Gaining one of the fiercely contested places at Welbeck, despite her physical stature, had been
the zenith of her young life.


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She had wanted to fight that afternoon when the Party militia came, young struts with their red
armbands and bright new cards that had President Armstrong's signature bold along the bottom to
say whatever they did was official. Fresh from her four terms of unarmed combat classes and rifle
shooting and square bashing she considered herself invincible. But her father, bigger and
stronger, had forced her into a storeroom and locked her in. Suzi hammered on the door in rage and
humiliation until sounds of the looting penetrated, the crash of breaking glass merging with
anguished screams. Then she shrank into a corner, hugging herself in the dark, and praying nobody
smashed down the door to find her.
The police discovered her the next morning, all cried out. As she saw the wreckage that was once
her home and her parents, rage turned to demonic hatred. She could have prevented it, she knew. if
she'd just been given the chance, been given the weapons hardware to complement her determination
and amplify her size.
The Trinities were led by an ex-British Army sergeant, Teddy La Croix, called Father by the kids
under his command. He put her to work as a runner.
Peterborough in those days had a raw frontier-town edge to it. Over fifty thousand people had
descended on the city, one step ahead of the rising sea that was slowly devouring the Fens, and
more were on the way. The polar melt and thermally expanded oceans eventually sent the muddy water
to lap at the city's eastern suburbs, turning the lush Nene valley into an estuary. This on top of
an indigenous population still struggling to adapt to the year-round heat, the imminent collapse
of public gas, electricity, and water grids, food rationing, and austerity economics.
Suzi flittered about the congested streets, soaking up the buzz of grim determination everyone
seemed to possess. She
PETER F. HAMILTON
4
watched the old temperate vegetation die in the steambath atmosphere exhaled by the Fens quagmire,
only to be replaced by the newer more vigorous tropical plants with their exotic blooms. She
walked entranced along the rows of stalls which sprang up along each road as the traffic faded
away, stealing often, eating well, and fighting with the barrow boys.
Nobody noticed her, one more kid running wild in a city teeming with thousands of her kind. She
thrived in her environment, but all the while she moved with purpose, keeping tabs on Party
members, watching who went in and out of the town hall, acting as a sentry for raids on Party
offices. At nights she would be there in the riots organized by the Trinities, an incongruously