"Richard Morgan - Woken Furies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morgan Richard)

Boom town. Bright new hope and brawling enthusiasm as the Mecsek money poured in. I limped down
thoroughfares littered with the detritus of spent human merriment. In my pocket, the freshly excised
cortical stacks clicked together like dice.

There was a fight going on at the intersection of Pencheva Street and Muko Prospect. The pipe houses
on Muko had just turned out and their synapse-fried patrons had met late-shift dock workers coming up
through the decayed quiet of the warehouse quarter. More than enough reason for violence. Now a
dozen badly co-ordinated figures stumbled back and forth in the street, flailing and clawing inexpertly at
each other while a gathered crowd shouted encouragement. One body already lay inert on the fused
glass paving, and someone else was dragging their body, a limb's length at a time, out of the fray,
bleeding. Blue sparks shorted off a set of overcharged power knuckles, elsewhere light glimmered on a
blade. But everyone still standing seemed to be having a good time and there were no police as yet.

Yeah, part of me jeered. Probably all too busy up the hill right now.

I skirted the action as best I could, shielding my injured side. Beneath the coat, my hands closed on the
smooth curve of the last hallucinogen grenade and the slightly sticky hilt of the Tebbit knife.

Never get into a fight if you can kill quickly and be gone.

Virginia Vidaura — Envoy Corps trainer, later career criminal and sometime political activist. Something
of a role model for me, though it was several decades since I'd last seen her. On a dozen different
worlds, she crept into my mind unbidden, and I owed that ghost in my head my own life a dozen times
over. This time I didn't need her or the knife. I got past the fight without eye contact, made the corner of
Pencheva and melted into the shadows that lay across the alley mouths on the seaward side of the street.
The timechip in my eye said I was late.

Pick it up, Kovacs. According to my contact in Millsport, Plex wasn't all that reliable at the best of
times, and I hadn't paid him enough to wait long.

Five hundred metres down and then left into the tight fractal whorls of Belacotton Kohei Section, named
centuries ago for the habitual content and the original owner/operator family whose warehouse frontages
walled the curving maze of alleys. With the Unsettlement and the subsequent loss of New Hokkaido as
any kind of market, the local belaweed trade pretty much collapsed and families like Kohei went rapidly
bankrupt. Now the grime-filmed upper-level windows of their facades peered sadly across at each other
over gape-mouthed loading bay entrances whose shutters were all jammed somewhere uncommitted
between open and closed.

There was talk of regeneration of course, of reopening units like these and retooling them as deCom
labs, training centres and hardware storage facilities.

Mostly, it was still just talk — the enthusiasm had kindled on the wharf line units facing the hoverloader
ramps further west, but so far it hadn't spread further in any direction than you could trust a wirehead
with your phone. This far off the wharf and this far east, the chitter of Mecsek finance was still pretty
inaudible.

The joys of trickledown.

Belacotton Kohei Nine Point Twenty-Six showed a faint glow in one upper window and the long