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

able to kill at least one of them; maybe two. Once he had their weapons,

taking care of the third would be a formality.

Something nudged him from behind.

What Vargovic saw when he turned around was something too repulsive even

for a nightmare. It was so wrong that for a faltering moment he could not

quite assimilate what it was he was looking at, as if the thing was a

three-dimensional perception test; a shape which refused to stabilise in

his head. The reason he could not hold it still was because part of him

refused to believe that this thing had any connection with humanity. But

the residual traces of human ancestry were too obvious to ignore.

Vargovic knew - beyond any reasonable doubt - that what he was seeing was

a Denizen. Others loomed from the cave depths. They were five more of

them; all roughly similar; all aglow with faint bioluminescence, all

regarding him with darkly intelligent eyes. Vargovic had seen pictures of

mermaids in books when he was a child; what he was looking at now were

macabre corruptions of those innocent illustrations. These things were the

same fusions of human and fish as in those pictures - but every detail had

been twisted toward ugliness, and the true horror of it was that the

fusion was total; it was not simply that a human torso had been grafted to

a fish's tail, but that the splice had been made - it was obvious - at the

genetic level, so that in every aspect of the creature there was something
 simultaneously and grotesquely piscine. The face was the worst; bisected

by a lipless down-curved slit of a mouth, almost sharklike. There was no

nose, not even a pair of nostrils; just an acreage of flat, sallow

fish-flesh. The eyes were forward facing; all expression compacted into