"Alastair Reynolds - Galactic North" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

"Neural conditioning. I treat the cargo as my offspring – all 20,000 of them. I can't betray them in
any way."
Seven smiled his piggy smile. "Funny; the last client thought that too."

Sometime later Irravel woke alone in a reefersleep casket. She remembered only dislocated
episodes of interrogation. There was the memory of a kind of sacrifice, and, later, of the worst terror
she could imagine -- so intense that she could not bring its cause to mind. Underpinning everything
was the certainty that she had not given up the codes.
So why was she still alive?
Everything was quiet and cold. Once she was able to move, she found a suit and wandered the
Hirondelle until she reached a porthole. They were still lashed to the comet. The other craft was
gone; presumably en route back to the base in the halo where the pirates must have had a larger
ship.
She looked for Markarian, but there was no sign of him.
Then she checked the 20-sleeper chambers; the thousand-berth dormitories. The chamber doors
were all open. Most of the sleepers were still there. They'd been butchered, carved open for
implants, minds pulped by destructive memory-trawling devices. The horror was too great for any
recognizable emotional response. The conditioning made each death feel like a stolen part of her.
Yet something kept her on the edge of sanity: the discovery that 200 sleepers were missing.
There was no sign that they'd been butchered like the others, which left the possibility that they'd
been abducted by the pig. It was madness; it would not begin to compensate for the loss of the
others -- but her psychology allowed no other line of thought.
She could find them again.

Her plan was disarmingly simple. It crystallized in her mind with the clarity of a divine vision. It
would be done.
She would repair the ship. She would hunt down Seven. She would recover the sleepers from
him. And enact whatever retribution she deemed fit.

She found the chamber where the four Conjoiners had slept, well away from the main dormitories,
in part of the ship where the pirates were not likely to have wandered. She was hoping she could
revive them and seek their assistance. There seemed no way they could make things worse for her.
But her hopes faded when she saw the scorch marks of weapon blasts around the bulkhead; the door
forced.
She stepped inside anyway.
They'd been a sect on Mars, originally; a clique of cyberneticists with a particular fondness for
self-experimentation. In 2190 their final experiment had involved distributed processing -- allowing
their enhanced minds to merge into one massively parallel neural net. The resultant event -- a
permanent, irrevocable escalation to a new mode of consciousness -- was known as the
Transenlightenment.
There'd been a war, of course.
Demarchists had long seen both sides. They used neural augmentation themselves, policed so that
they never approached the Conjoiner threshold. They'd brokered the peace, defusing the suspicion
around the Conjoiners. Conjoiners had fuelled Demarchist expansion from Europa with their
technologies, fused in the white-heat of Transenlightenment. Four of them were along as observers
because the Hirondelle used their ramscoop drives.
 Irravel still didn't trust them.
And maybe it didn't matter. The reefersleep units -- fluted caskets like streamlined coffins -- were
riddled with blast holes. Grimacing against the smell, Irravel examined the remains inside. They'd
been cut open, but the pirates seemed to have abandoned the job halfway through, not finding the