"Jay Lake & Greg van Eekhout - C-Rock City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

How exactly they did it remains a mystery, or a dirty secret, depending
on how you viewed things like forced labor. There were stories of the
Proctor doing some interesting neuromods on the slaves, giving them a
way to maneuver without seeing, a way to coordinate their efforts without
speaking. Surgeries like that can go very wrong. They kill, vegetablize, or
leave a person stark raving. Doing that to people, even slaves, is the kind of
thing that sends ordinary folk to prison, but makes extraor-dinary folk like
the Proctor fat, rich, and hysterically happy.

In the end, when the Proctor wanted the keys to his city, the surviving
slaves were spaced from the cargo locks. They were told that they’d be
boarding ships to freedom, herded into those cold, echoing spaces and the
hatches were opened. That was it for them. After, the maintenance crews
never could get the moisture out of the seals. Not in the whole lifetime of
the city. They called that stuff “miners’ tears.” I never knew my mother, but
those were her tears.

****

I SIGNED OUT of Katie, snatched up my liberty tag, and hand-overed
down the docking tube to the port collar and into Number Two rock. Number
Two was the center of gravity in the little whirling three-body problem that
comprised C-Rock City. It was the place to be for guys like me, far away
from the Proctor and his yacht, his friends and his ass-kissers, and his
security out in the playground privacy Number One.

I hoped they’d all stay there.
 There were some very fine tunnel carvings, even in the docking tube,
once I got past the metal and plastic locks. Frieze work showed what I took
to be coronal flares, the sort of image that would be on the minds of people
who’d gone blind on Mer-cury. It looked to have been carved with
something a lot finer than a mining laser.

The slaves hadn’t had much else to do but work, whether on the
Proctor’s time or their own.

Someone back during the build-out phase of construction had
enjoyed a weird taste in eleva-tors. To get down to the core I had to grab a
handring and ride a chain rig that looped through a descending shaft. I’d
never encountered anything else quite like it in my travels—dogbone links
joined together on little pivots, dripping grease that reeked of algae, the
groaning rattle of gearing at the coreward end of the shaft as it dragged you
in.

I got off when the getting was good, where it ended at the Number
Two core. There was a gallery of shops, service establishments, and bars
catering to a low-gee clientele, all arranged in a sort of inward-facing globe
of storefronts criss-crossed with railings and grip cables. It was also where
the primary connector cables were anchored. I wanted to walk down to
Number Three, out in the glittering darkness, stare at the shadowed