"Paul J. McAuley - Sea Change, with Monsters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Indira had started out as an apprentice to Vlad Simonov; now she free-lanced
for him. He was one of the first generation of hunters, one of the few to have
survived the early days of tracking the biowar macroforms, the mon-sters, which had
been set loose during the Quiet War. Vlad liked to project a buccaneering image. He
had two wives and five children. He drank brandy and smoked huge cigars. He had a
wild mane of black hair with little lights spidering inside its curls. But there was no
safer or more cautious hunter in all of Europa’s ocean.
She said, “A dragon.”
“Perhaps a dragon. Are you scared?”
“I’m always scared.”
A pod of urchins had ambushed her toward the end of the last job. She had
been finning down a long flaw in pure water ice, leading her diving buddy, a nervous
farm worker. The flaw had been polished smooth by methane seep. It had reflected
her lights in a bluewhite glare that had prevented her see-ing very much of what was
ahead. The urchins had fallen down on her from a crevice. She had doubled up,
knocking two urchins off her face mask—their spines left deep scratches in the
glass—and had started firing her flechette pistol even as she kicked backward. Her
diving buddy had been frozen in fear, blocking her escape; the urchins had bobbed
toward her through a dancing dazzle of reflected light. She had coldly and
methodically killed every one of them in a Zenlike calm that had thawed to violent
trembling as soon as the slaughter was over.
She told Vlad, “I can’t go solo against a dragon. If it is a dragon.”
He said, “You won’t need to go solo. The monks have a big weed farm and
their workers will help you. Anyway, it’s probably no more than a mako. No one has
seen a dragon for years—they’re probably extinct. The monks see something lurking
just beyond their perimeter and make it bigger than it is. Let me tell you what I
know.”

Indira’s daughter, Alice, came in two hours later. She found her mother in the
workshop, with the luggage pod open on the floor. She said, “You only just came
home.”
“I know, sweet.”
Alice stood in the doorway, bouncing up and down as gently as a tethered
balloon. Seven years old, smart and determined. She wore baggy shorts and a nylon
vest with many pockets and an iridescent flared collar that rose above her head like a
lizard’s ruff. Fluorescent tattoos braided her thin brown arms. She had changed
them since she had gone off to school that morning. They had been interlocking
lizards and birds then; now they were long fluttering banners, red and violet and
maroon. Her hair was done up in tight cornrows and decorated with little tags that
flashed in random patterns of yellow and green.
Alice said, “Have you told Carr yet?”
Indira didn’t look up. She was concentrating on fitting her dry suit into the
pod, taking great care not to crease it. She said, “He’ll be home soon. How was
school?”
“I’m doing a project.”
“You must tell me all about it.”
“It’s a secret.”
A pause. Indira knew that her daughter had been down to the service lev-els of
the city again, at the bottom of the ice. She had beeped Alice’s location after she had
finalized the contract with Vlad. And Alice knew that she knew. She watched