"Ken Macleod - Fall Revolution 3 - The Cassini Division" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

Suze stepped out of the shower just as the suit’s agent was reporting back.
“Oh!” she said. “A pet mouse. How sweet!”
“Grrr,” said the suit, but I’m sure all Suze heard was a squeak. I took a shower myself, and
emerged to find that Suze had brewed some coffee and dressed for dinner.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the coffee. “Nice dress.”
Suze looked down at it smugly. “Fortuny pleats, they’re called,” she said. “You can just ball it
up in a rucksack, and when you shake it out it still looks great.”
“Ah,” I said, “I have something to show you.”
I climbed back into my clothes, which were still sweaty and crumpled from travelling. They all
added up to only part of the suit the rest being the mouse, and the rucksack with its contents but
there was still enough for it to do the Cinderella trick, and mimic net and lace from an archived
memory of debutante froth. I twirled, and grinned at Suze’s open mouth.
“Smart-matter spacesuit,” I explained, sitting down and patting its bouffant skirts. Suze was still
goggle-eyed.
“You’re from space?”
“Yes,” I said. “The Cassini Division, in fact.”
“Wow!” Suze’s amazed look turned to an awed, and slightly guilty, excitement which I’d
encountered before. In a world of abundance, of peace and security, the Division was the biggest
focus for the dangerous appeal of danger, the sexy thrill of violence. There were those who
despised and feared it for that very reason, and those who sometimes secretly, even from
themselves loved it. Suze, it seemed, was among the latter.
“That’s why I want to talk to Malley,” I said.
“About the wormhole?” Sharp girl.
“Yes. We want him to show us how to get through it. To New Mars.”
“Start our own settlement?”
I shook my head firmly. “We-don’t need another lot of deserts!” Something some sudden light
in her eyes told me her secret answer: we do, we do! Not everybody would feel that way, but I
knew that enough did for Wilde to have seen that look all the many times he told his tales. No
wonder he had the crazy notion that if we could go through, we’d colonize the place.
“So why do we need to go through?” Suze asked. “Why now?”
“We need to go through,” I said carefully, “because there’s a chance that the people on the other
side of the wormhole are tinkering about with the same entities that the Outwarders became the
Jovians on this side. We’re going to go through, and stop them, with whatever it takes.” (This was
true, as far as it went, which was not very far.) Suze sat back in one of the armchairs and looked at
me, shaking her head.
“Why don’t people know about this? Why haven’t we been told?”
 “We’re not keeping it exactly secret,” I said. “It’s just that we’ve released the information in
scientific reports and so on, rather than making a big splash of it. So far, everybody who’s
managed to figure out what’s going on must have agreed with us that there’s no need to panic.”
“That may be right,” she said indignantly, “but there is a need to discuss it! You can’t just go
and do something like that, without any, any -“
“Authorization? Actually, we can, in the sense that nobody could stop us. We wouldn’t want to
do that, because we that is, the Division would fall apart if we ever went against the Union, because
we’d have a strong and well-armed minority who didn’t want to go against the Union. But as a
matter of fact, we do have authorization. We’re mandated to protect the Inner System from outside
threats, and if a possible post-human invasion coming out of the wormhole isn’t one, I don’t know
what is.”
Suze still looked troubled. “What about the New Martians?” she asked. “I don’t see them going
along with it.”
I laughed. “If they’re still people ... they’re just a bunch of noncos. And we know how to deal