"Alastair Reynolds - A Spy In Europa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

evidence of human presence. There was a head-up display in the goggles.

Vargovic experimented with the readout modes before calling up a map of

the whole area. It showed his location, and also three dots which were

following him from C-A.

He was being tailed by Demarchy security.

They were at least three kilometres behind him now, but they were

perceptibly narrowing the distance. With a cold feeling gripping his gut,

it occurred to Vargovic that there was no way he could make it to the

extraction point before the Demarchy caught him.

Ahead, he noticed a thermal hot-spot; heat bubbling up from the relatively

shallow level of the rock floor. The security operatives were probably

tracking him via the gill-worker's appropriated equipment. But once he was

near the vent he could ditch it: the water was warmer there; he wouldn't

need the suit, and the heat, light and associated turbulence would confuse

any other tracking system. He could lie low behind a convenient rock,

stalk them while they were preoccupied with the homing signal.

It struck Vargovic as a good plan. He made the distance to the vent

quickly, feeling the water warm around him, noticing how the taste of it

changed; turning brackish. The vent was a fiery red fountain surrounded by

bacteria-crusted rocks and the colourless Europan equivalent of coral.

Ventlings were everywhere; their pulpy bags shifting as the currents

altered. The smallest were motile, ambling on their stilts like animated
bagpipes, navigating around the triadic stumps of their dead relatives.

Vargovic ensconced himself in a cave, after placing the gill-worker

equipment near another cave on the far side of the vent, hoping that the

security operatives would look there first. While they did so, he would be