"Sea Change, With Monsters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Paul J. McAuley

SEA CHANGE, WITH MONSTERS


She made it clear that she was taking the job as a favor.
Vlad Simonov pretended to be slighted by her reluctance. He said, “But Indira, what’s the problem? It’s a fantastic job, and it’s not as if you are working.”
“I have been working,” Indira said. “Now I’m resting.”
She had spent two weeks supervising the clearance of an infestation of urchins at the perimeter of a farm collective. It had been difficult, dangerous, tiring work, and she had nearly been killed in almost exactly the same way she had nearly been killed on her first job, when she hadn’t really known what she had been doing. She had come full circle. She was beginning to believe that she had killed enough monsters.
Vlad snapped his fingers and leaned close to the camera of his phone. “After that picayune little job, you need to rest? That kind of thing, I do as an exercise. I do it for relaxation! I do it in my sleep, after a proper day’s work.. Listen, Indira, I would take this job myself, it is so good, except already I am committed to three others. So I give it to you. With my usual commission of course, but the terms are so generous you will not notice the little I have kept to take home to feed my children.”
Vlad’s restless, goodhumored energy was apparent even over the phone. Indira laughed.
He said chidingly, “Indira, Indira. You are getting old. You are getting bored. Urchins, spinners, makos, they’re all the same to you. Routine, routine, routine. It hurts me to see you like this. So, I put some pep in your life. To make you think again. To make you love life. Say yes. You will have fun, I promise.”
“Vlad…we are all getting old.”
“Not the monsters. While you sit around in your nice, warm, comfortable apt, the monsters are swimming in the cold and the dark, pumping sulfides, getting strong. Indira, this is a very exciting job, and the people who commission it are some kind of funny monks who know nothing about the value of money. You will be rich, even after my tiny percentage is removed. They claim it is a dragon, Indira. You have never hunted a dragon, but I know you can do it. That is why I ask only you.”
“And that’s why I’m taking it as a favor to you, Vlad. Because I know no one else will do it.”
Indira had started out as an apprentice to Vlad Simonov; now she freelanced 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 monsters, 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 seeing 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 levels 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 solemnly as her mother checked the weapon cases. They were flat metal shells with foam plastic bedding inside. The smallest contained three kinds of specific neurotoxin in glass snaptop vials. Indira made very sure that these were packed properly.
At last, Alice said, “Did you know that the city once hid another name?”
“Of course.”
“It was called Minos. Why was that?”
“Because Minos was one of the sons of Europa. Of Europa and Zeus.”
When Alice stamped her foot, she bounced a meter into the air. “I know that! It means creature of the moon. He was the king who built a maze under his palace. But why did it change?”
“Politics.”
“Oh. You mean the war.”
Alice had been born ten years after the Quiet War. Like all of her generation, she couldn’t understand why the adults around her spent so much time talking about it when it clearly made them so unhappy.
“Yes, the war. Where did you find this out?”
“I saw a sign,”
“A sign? In school?”
Alice shook her head. “Of course not in school. The Goonies—” which was the latest nickname for the soldiers of the Three Powers Occupying Force—have changed all the signs they know about. But they don’t know everything.”
“Then where was it?”
Alice said, “Carr will be cross because you’re going away again so soon.”
“That’s because he loves me almost as much as he loves you. Where was this sign, Alice?”
“It’s to do with my project. So it’s a secret until my project’s finished.”
Indira closed the luggage pod. It made a little whirring noise as it sealed itself up. She didn’t want an argument just before she went away, but she didn’t want Alice to think that she could disobey her. She said, “I think we had better have a little talk, you and I.”
Later, Carr said, “There’s nothing to harm her down there.”