"Drake, David & S M Stirling - General 99 - Warlord (omnibus)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

Raj Whitehall nodded. The surviving skeletons were eerily complete, like an anatomy model; no toothmarks, nothing disturbed by scavengers.

"I don't think there's much point in going that way," he answered, waving to the darkness on their right. The beam of his lamp showed nothing but the walls of the corridor, fading to a geometric point with distance. "That heads due east, near as I can tell." Out from under the city and towards the hills. "If there's anything beyond that . . . light . . . we might find another shaft leading up."

Thom nodded, wiping a sleeve across his mouth. "Maybe. I wish we'd brought some water."

Raj grinned. "I wish you hadn't said that," he said. "I really do."

* * *
"Mirrors," Thom said. For the first time in Raj's memory, there was real awe in his friend's voice. "I've never seen mirrors like this.

"I've never seen a light like that, either," Raj said.

The room was circular, floored and roofed with mirrors, and with a single seamless sheet of mirror for the walls. The center of the circle was a pillar of light; white, glareless, heatless, odorless, shining on the endless repeated figures of the two men. Raj felt himself stagger in place, lost and splintered in fractions of himself. It was a moment before he noticed the last, the intolerable strangeness.

"Thom," he said urgently. "Why don't the mirrors reflect the light?" There it was before their eyes, a column as physically real as their own hands, a light that was all that kept this place from being as dark as a coffin. Yet in the mirrors there was no trace of it, only the two men and their equipment.

Thom blinked for an instant; then his eyes widened and he turned to run. Did run, one single step before freezing in place as if turned to stone. Even his expression froze, and Raj could see that his pupils shared the paralysis. The doorway that had been Thom's goal had . . . not closed, simply vanished; only the direction of the living statue that had been his friend enabled Raj to tell it from any other part of the smooth mirror curve. The light-pillar in the center of the room blazed higher.

Raj fired, with his second finger on the trigger and the index pointing along the barrel, the way the armsman had taught him: at close range, you just pointed and pulled. The five shots rang out almost as one, the orange muzzle flashes and smoke dazzling his eyes. Almost as loud was the bang-whinnnng of the soft lead bullets ricocheting and spattering off the diamond hard surfaces of the room; they left no mark at all. Something struck Raj in the foot with sledgehammer force, a bullet tearing off the heel of one boot. A long tear appeared in the floppy tweed of Thom's breeches . . . Then nothing, nothing except an acrid cloud of dirty-white powder smoke that made Raj cough reflexively.

Raj's muscles seized halfway through the motion of reloading. A voice spoke: not in his ears, but in his mind. Spoke with an inhuman detachment that had a flavor of hard-edged crispness:

yes. yes, you will do very well.


Chapter Two
The floor had vanished, and the pillar of light. There was nothing beneath him, although he could feel the pressure of weight under his feet. The off-white haze of powder smoke cleared rapidly, as if the air was being circulated without a detectable breeze. Thom hung suspended also, still in the first motion of flight, as if this was the Outer Dark where those who rejected the Spirit of Man fell frozen forever.

He heard his throat trying to whimper, and that brought him back to himself. He was a Whitehall of Hillchapel, and a soldier, and a man grown. The worst this whatever-it-was could do was kill him, and a paving stone in the riots could have done that. Or a scropied in his boot on a hunting trip, or a Colonist bullet or a Brigade bayonet. His soul only the Spirit could damn or save.

yes. excellent.

"Who the Dark are you?" Raj said, trying for the tone his father had used on machinery-salesmen back at Hillchapel. Hillchapel, sweet wild scent of the silverpine blowing down from the heights, the sound of a blacksmith's hammer on iron—

I am Sector Command and Control Unit AZ12-b14-c000 Mk. XIV.

Awe struck the human; he tried to genuflect, found himself still immobile. "Are you . . . a computer?" he asked incredulously.

yes. although not in the sense you use the term.

"What do you mean?"

i am not a supernatural being.

"What are you, then?"

i am a sentient artificial entity of photonic subsystems tasked with the politico-military supervision of this sector for Federation Command.

That's what a supernatural being is, dammit. Raj frowned; that was straight out of the Creed, and even the phrasing was the archaic dialect the priests used. First it says it isn't a supernatural being, then it says it's working for the Holy Federation, he thought in bewilderment. An angel.