"Hutchinson, Dave - Tir-na-nOg" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

"All right." I pin the ROM back on my jacket. For some reason it irritates Benedict hugely when I start flipping it. I don't know why. Maybe her mother was once frightened by a George Raft film.

"News from home," she tells me. Meaning she's been on the satellite link with her masters in their underground Arizona complex, which is supposed to be able to withstand a groundburst nuclear explosion of a little over two megatons. "Hey's bank accounts are gone."

"Maybe he needed some mad money," I theorize halfheartedly.

"You would think so, wouldn't you," she says with a heavy edge of sarcasm in her voice. "Except under an arrangement made with his bankers before he went missing, the bulk of his money has been given to our major competitor."

I know I'm making a mistake, but I burst out laughing anyway. "And I suppose they need the money, eh?"

"I suppose." And, for the first time in days, we make eye contact. She has lovely eyes, a peculiar deep-sea green you only see, far away on the very edge of infinity, if you hold two mirrors up to each other. One or both could be implant-cameras, it's impossible to tell.

She sighs and turns away. "Come upstairs, Monkey. I want to give you a geography lesson."

"A what?" I ask, following.




· · · · ·


Up in our room, Benedict heaves her big metal suitcase out from under the bed and wipes a cardkey down the slot in the side. Then she dumps it on the duvet, spins the combination locks, snaps up the catches, lifts the lid.
"A geography lesson, Monkey," she says. "I want to show you where you are."

"I know where I am," I tell her.

Looking down into the case, she says, "You have no idea where you are. Come here."

I step over beside her. Inside the case, nested in foam, are decks and sets, consoles, palmtops, satcoms, edge connectors, alphanumeric tapboards, umbrella dishes, paper-thin polycarbonate flatscreens rolled up like posters, brightly-colored braids of optic ribbon. Designer tech; the collective unconscious of our age.

She lifts out one of the devices, a thing the size of an old-style portable typewriter and the thickness of a paperback novel. It seems by far the least complicated of all her toys: a touch-sensitive keyboard, some little LCD panels, tiny integral screen, input-output jacks.

"Know what this is?"

"It is not logical, Captain," I deadpan, trying to ignore the itchy feeling down my backbone.

She doesn't even bother to look at me. "It's a portable cracking deck."

"Oh." Then, "Why did you bring that?"

"Hey took one of these out of Grantbridge with him, among other things," she says, which doesn't answer my question.

"What for?"

"Well, if we knew that …" She puts the cracking device back in its nest in the case, takes out another object, a matte-black thing shaped like an old-fashioned peppermill with a pistol grip grafted onto it. Even I know what that is. She takes a step back and points it at me. "I'm not playing, Monkey."

The wide end of the pistol is dotted with hundreds of little holes. I shrug. "Me neither."

Benedict smiles and takes a cassette from the case. "It isn't loaded, Monkey." She snaps the cassette into the side of the pistol, twists the barrel until it clicks. "Now it's loaded." And she points it at my head. "On full automatic," she says, sighting down the fat barrel, "this thing will empty a cassette of two thousand flechettes in just over a second. At this range that's more than enough to completely vaporize your head."