"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

back spars. Gape-mouthed, they sucked in tiny amounts of interstellar hydrogen and subjected the
harvest to some frankly unimaginable physics. No one, not even Volyova, pretended to know how
the Conjoiner engines worked. What mattered was that they functioned. What also mattered was
that they gave off a steady warm glow of exotic particle radiation, and while most would have been
mopped up by the ship's hull shielding, some of it would get through. That was why the elevator
sped up momentarily as it dropped past the engines, and then slowed down to its normal descent
speed once it had passed out of danger.
Now she was two-thirds of the way down the ship. She knew this district better than any of the
other crew members: Sajaki, Hegazi and the others seldom came down this far unless they had
excellent reason. And who could blame them? The further down they went, the closer they got to
the Captain. She was the only one who was not terrified by the very idea of his proximity.
No; far from fearing this realm of the ship, she had made an empire of it. At level 612 she could
have disembarked, navigated to the spider-room and taken it outside the hull, where she could listen
to the ghosts which haunted the spaces between the stars. Tempting -- always so. But she had work
to do -- she was on a specific errand -- and the ghosts would still be there another time. At level
500, she passed the floor which contained the gunnery, and thought of all the problems which it
represented, and had to resist stopping to carry out a few new investigations. Then the gunnery was
gone and she was falling through the cache chamber -- one of several huge, non-pressurised
inclusions within the ship.
The chamber was enormous; the best part of half a kilometre from end to end, but it was dark
now and Volyova had to imagine for herself the forty things which it contained. That was never
hard. While there were many unanswered questions relating to the functions and origins of the
things, Volyova knew their shapes and relative positions perfectly, as if they were the carefully
positioned furnishings of a blind person's bedroom. Even in the elevator she felt she could reach out
and stroke the alloy husk of the nearest of them, just to reassure herself that it was still there. She
had been learning what she could of the things for most of the time since she had joined the
Triumvirate, but she would not have claimed to have been at ease with any of them. She approached
them with the nervousness of a new lover, knowing that the knowledge she had gleaned to date was
entirely skin-deep, and that what lay below might shatter every illusion she had.
She was never entirely sorry to exit the cache.
At 450 she shot through another armature, spacing the utility section from the ship's tapering
conic tail, which extended below for another kilometre. Again a surge as the elevator rode through a
rad-zone, then the beginning of prolonged deceleration which would eventually bring it to a halt. It
was passing through the second set of cryogenic storage decks, two hundred and fifty levels capable
of holding one hundred and twenty thousand, though of course there was currently only one sleeper,
if one was so generously inclined as to describe the Captain's state as sleep. The elevator was
slowing now. Midway through the cryo levels it stopped, cordially announcing that it had reached
her destination.
'Passenger cryogenic sleep level concierge,' said the elevator. 'For your in-flight reefersleep
requirements. Thank you for using this service.'
The door opened and she stepped across the threshold, glancing down at the converging,
illuminated walls of the shaft framed by the gap. She had travelled almost the entire length of the
ship (or height -- it was difficult not to think of the ship as a tremendously tall building) and yet the
shaft seemed to drop down to infinite depths below. The ship was so large -- so stupidly large -- that
even its extremities beggared the mind.
'Yes, yes. Now kindly piss off.'
'I'm sorry?'
'Go away.'
 Not that the elevator would, of course -- at least not for any real purpose other than placating her.
It had nothing else to do but wait for her. Being the sole person awake, Volyova was the only one