"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Craters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

into the camp, sprawled outside thin government-issue tents, those bug swarms
covering their faces, their stomachs distended, their limbs pieces of scrap so thin
that they don’t even look like useful sticks.

Then you set the memories—the knowledge—aside. You’re good at setting
things aside. That’s a skill you acquire in this job, if you didn’t already have it when
you came in. The I’ll-think-about-it-later skill, a promise to the self that is never
fulfilled.

Because if you do think about it later, you get overwhelmed. You figure out
pretty damn quickly that if you do think about all the things you’ve seen—all the
broken bodies, all the dying children—you’ll break, and if you break you won’t be
able to work, and if you can’t work, you can no longer be.

After a while, work is all that’s left to you. Between the misplaced trust and
the sights no human should have to bear, you stand, reporting, because you believe
someone will care, someone stronger will Do Something.

Even though, deep down, you know, there is no one stronger, and nothing
ever gets done.

****

5:15 PM Upload: Suicide Squadron Part I by Martha Trumante

General Amanda Pedersen tells the story as if it happened two days ago
instead of twenty years ago. She’s sitting in one of the many cafeterias in the
Louvre, this one just beneath the glass pyramid where the tourists enter. She’s an
American soldier on leave, spending a week with her student boyfriend at the
Sorbonne. He has classes. She’s seeing the sights.

She’s just resting her feet, propping them up— American-style—on the
plastic chair across from her. From her vantage, she can’t see the first round of
security in the pyramid itself, but she can see the second set of metal detectors, the
ones installed after the simultaneous attacks of ’19 that leveled half the Prado in
Madrid and the Tate in London.

She likes watching security systems—that’s what got her to enlist in the first
place, guaranteeing a sense of security in an insecure world—and she likes
watching people go through them.

The little boy and his mother are alone on the escalator coming down. They
reach the security desk, the woman opening her palm to reveal the number
embedded under the skin, her son—maybe four, maybe five—bouncing with
excitement beside her.

A guard approaches him, says something, and the boy extends his arms—
European, clearly, used to high levels of security. The guard runs his wand up the
boy’s legs, over his crotch, in front of his chest—