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

'That's a threat, is it?'
'A statement of fact. If you paid more attention to what was going on elsewhere in the colony,
you'd know that Girardieau's planning to move against you. The word is that move's a hell of a lot
closer than you think.'
The back of his neck prickled. 'What are you talking about?'
'What else? A coup.' Sluka pushed past him to ascend the ladder up the side of the pit. When she
had a foot on the first rung, she turned back and addressed the other two students, both minding
their own business, heads down in concentration as they worked to reveal the obelisk. 'Work for as
long as you want, but don't say no one warned you. And if you've any doubts as to what being
caught in a razorstorm is like, take a look at Sylveste.'
One of the students looked up, timidly. 'Where are you going, Sluka?'
'To speak to the other dig teams. Not everyone may know about that advisory. When they hear, I
don't think many of them will be in any hurry to stay.'
She started climbing, but Sylveste reached up and grabbed the heel of her mukluk. Sluka looked
down at him. She was wearing the mask now, but Sylveste could still see the contempt in her
expression. 'You're finished, Sluka.'
'No: she said climbing. 'I've just begun. It's you I'd worry about.'
Sylveste examined his own state of mind and found -- it was the last thing he had expected --
total calm. But it was like the calm that existed on the metallic hydrogen oceans of the gas giant
planets further out from Pavonis -- only maintained by crushing pressures from above and below.
'Well?' Pascale said.
'There's someone I need to talk to,' Sylveste said.

Sylveste climbed the ramp into his crawler. The other was crammed with equipment racks and
sample containers, with hammocks for his students pressed into the tiny niches of unoccupied
space. They had to sleep aboard the machines because some of the digs in the sector -- like this one
-- were over a day's travel from Mantell itself. Sylveste's crawler was considerably better appointed,
with over a third of the interior dedicated to his own stateroom and quarters. The rest of the
machine was taken up with additional payload space and a couple of more modest quarters for his
senior workers or guests: in this case Sluka and Pascale. Now, however, he had the whole crawler to
himself.
The stateroom's decor belied the fact that it was aboard a crawler. It was walled in red velvet, the
shelves dotted with facsimile scientific instruments and relics. There were large, elegantly annotated
Mercator maps of Resurgam dotted with the sites of major Amarantin finds; other areas of wall
were covered in slowly updating texts: academic papers in preparation. His own beta-level was
doing most of the scutwork on the papers now; Sylveste had trained the simulation to the point
where it could imitate his style more reliably than he could, given the current distractions. Later, if
there was time, he would need to proof those texts, but for now he gave them no more than a glance
as he moved to the room's escritoire. The ornate writing desk was decorated in marble and
malachite, inset with japanwork scenes of early space exploration.
Sylveste opened a drawer and removed a simulation cartridge, an unmarked grey slab, like a
ceramic tile. There was a slot in the escritoire's upper surface. He would only have to insert the
cartridge to invoke Calvin. He hesitated, nonetheless. It had been some time -- months, at least --
since he had brought Calvin back from the dead, and that last encounter had gone spectacularly
badly. He had promised himself he would only invoke Calvin again in the event of crisis. Now it
was a matter of judging whether the crisis had really arrived -- and if it was sufficiently troublesome
to justify an invocation. The problem with Calvin was that his advice was only reliable about half
the time.
 Sylveste pressed the cartridge into the escritoire.
Fairies wove a figure out of light in the middle of the room: Calvin seated in a vast seigneurial