"Nancy Kress - Art of War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

I stared at him. The Teli looted the art of Terran colonies whenever they
could, and no one knew why. It was logical that rumors would run riot about that.
Still... “Lieutenant, the Taj Mahal was a building. A huge one, and on Terra. It was
destroyed in the twenty-first century. Food Riots, not by the Teli. They’ve never
reached Terra.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly disappointed. “I heard the Taj was a sort of holo of all
these exotic sex positions.”

“No.”

“Oh, well.” He sighed deeply. “Good luck, Captain.”

“Thank you.”

The Citadel—our Human name for it, of course—turned out to be the
entrance into a mountain. Presumably the Teli had excavated bunkers in the solid
rock, but you couldn’t tell that from the outside. A veteran NCO met me at the guard
station. “Captain Porter? I’m Sergeant Lu, head of your as-signment detail. Can I
take these bags, sir?”

“Hello, Sergeant.” He was ruddy, spit-and-polish military, with an uned-ucated
accent—obviously my “detail” was not going to consist of any other scholars. They
were there to do grunt work. But Lu looked amiable and willing, and I relaxed
slightly. He led me to my quarters, a trapezoid-shaped, low-ceilinged room with
elaborately etched stone walls and no contents except a human bed, chest, table, and
chair.

Immediately, I examined the walls, the usual dense montage of Teli sym-bols
that were curiously evocative even though we didn’t understand their meanings.
They looked handmade, and recent. “What was this room before we arrived?”

Lu shrugged. “Don’t know what any of these rooms were to the tellies, sir.
We cleaned ‘em all out and vapped everything. Might have been booby-trapped, you
know.”

“How do we know the whole Citadel isn’t booby-trapped?”

“We don’t, sir.”

I liked his unpretentious fatalism. “Let’s leave this gear here for now—I’d like
to see the vaults. And call me Jon. What’s your first name, Sergeant?”

“Ruhan. Sir.” But there was no rebuke in his tone.

The four vaults were nothing like I had imagined.

Art, even stolen art—maybe especially stolen art—is usually handled with
care. After all, trouble and resources have been expended to obtain it, and it is