"Paul J. McAuley - Winning Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Rider Jackson said, “Don’t make a game out of it. If you don’t tell him, I
will.”

The two men stared at each other for a long moment. Then Mr. Kanza smiled
and said, “I do believe you like him. I knew you would.”

“Do what needs to be done.”

Mr. Kanza conjured video from the air with a quick gesture. Here was Jarred
White in a steel cell, wearing the same kind of black pajamas Carver had worn in the
prison hospital, before he’d been sold into what the Col-lective called indentured
labor and the Alliance called slavery. Here was Jarred standing in gray coveralls
against a red marble wall in the atrium of Mr. Kanza’s house.

Mr. Kanza told Carver, “Your brother was taken prisoner, just like you. One
of my data miners traced him, and I bought out his contract. What do you think of
that?”

Carver thought that the videos were pretty good fakes, probably disneyed up
from his brother’s military record. In both of the brief sequences, Jarred sported the
same severe crew cut that was regulation for cadets in the Alli-ance Navy, not
serving officers; when Carver had last seen him, his brother had grown his crew cut
out into a flattop. That had been on Persopolis, the City of Our Lady of Flowers.
Some twenty days later, Carver’s drop ship had been crippled, and he’d been taken
prisoner. Three days later Jarred had been killed in action.

The Collective didn’t allow its POWs any contact with their families or
anyone else in the Alliance; Carver had found out about his brother’s death from one
of the other prisoners of war working in the pharm facto-ries. Jarred’s frigate, the
Croatian, had been shepherding ships loaded with evacuees from Eve’s Halo when
a Collective battleship traveling at a tenth the speed of light had smashed through the
convoy. The Croatian had been shredded by kinetic weapons and a collapsium
bomblet had cooked off what was left: the ship had been lost with all hands. Carver
had been hit badly by the news. Possessed by moments of unreasoning anger, he’d
started to pick fights with other workers; finally, he attacked one of the guards. The
woman paralyzed him with her shock stick, gave him a clinically methodi-cal beating,
and put him on punishment detail, shoveling cell protein from extraction pits. Carver
would have died there if one of Mr. Kanza’s data miners hadn’t tracked him down.

After Mr. Kanza bought out his contract, Carver resolved to become a model
worker, cultivate patience, and wait for a chance to escape; now, won-dering if that
chance had finally come, if he could turn Mr. Kanza’s crude trick to his advantage,
he stepped hard on his anger and held his tongue.

Mr. Kanza said to Rider Jackson, “You see? Not a speck of gratitude.”

Rider Jackson turned his tell-nothing expression on Carver; Carver stared
back at him through his brother’s faked-up ghost.

The young lieutenant said to Mr. Kanza, “You’re certain we can trust him?”