"Ken MacLeod - The Highway Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

was a fix for exactly the problem we had right now: buried boulders. (As
well as for tree stumps and stuck cars and stuff like that.)

The trouble was, you had to have enough clear space around your
obstacle to wrap them in. I heaved on the crowbar. The boulder rocked a
few centimetres. Soil that had been hard even for the drill to break into
suddenly crumbled and slid into the gap. It filled it completely. I heaved
again. I knew this could be done. We’d done it about twenty times already.
People had been growing oats and potatoes and turnips on this plain for
hundreds of years. You’d think they’d have got rid of all the boulders. Turns
out they only got rid of them as deep as the plough digs, which is not a
metre, not even half a metre.
 “Why don’t you just take the trench around the boulders?” Liam had
asked. He moved his hand like a fish.

“You know what we find when we do that?”

“Other boulders?”

“Got it.”

“Oh well. Carry on, gentlemen.”

So we carried on. My second heave on the crowbar shifted the
boulder again. I could see black space behind it.

“Give us a hand,” I said.

Euan spat his tab and jumped down into the trench and wrapped a
pair of flexies around the boulder. The ends knotted themselves. At the
same time tiny grippers came out the cable and stuck to the rock like ivy. I
let the crowbar sag back. We stood and looked at it for a minute.

“It’ll no hold,” I said. “It’s too near the top.”

Euan stretched five more flexies across the exposed surface, then
tugged on the chain.

“It’ll stick like an octopus to a face mask,” he proclaimed.

“Well, I’m not sticking around,” I said.

We clambered out of the trench, backed well clear, and gave Murdo
the thumbs-up. The winch whined. The chain straightened. The tension
built. The chain and flexies lashed through the air like a cat-o’-nine-tails and
clanged against the cab.

“So much for that,” said Euan. “Try again?”

I looked around. The sun was behind the Atlantic. To the east the pink