"Charles Stross - Duat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

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2: In the Duat

because there won't be any."

Oshi dry-swallowed. "What's the job?"

The Boss snapped his fingers and the wall behind the dais cleared to black. Oshi gasped:
stars glinted in the night like merciless pinpricks of nuclear fire.

"Here's where we are." A star winked green for a moment. "Here's the Ridge cluster.
Eighteen settled worlds; some civilized, some less so." A fistful of stars flashed green, the
first one lying on their periphery. "And here -- this is Ridgegap-47." A single star blinked
red and baleful, separated from the cluster by an arc of a few degrees. "Ten light years out
from here. Although it's closer in to the Centre than we are, it's located in a pocket of late
colonization: the Von Neumann machines have only recently reached those stars.
Ridgegap-47 hasn't been colonized yet. There's nobody there but a bunch of robot
factories, and one of my colleagues. He was to set up a dirtworld farm, but after what has
happened nearby ..."

A slash of stars flared blue then winked out, nearly bisecting the wall-sized map. "The
net's down throughout that entire quadrant," the Boss said laconically. "Something's been
eating worlds, some Ultrabright weapon. Ridgegap-47 was due for a colony shot round
about now, to innoculate it with human beings for the new world that is being terraformed.
But it's not going to happen as long as we keep losing handshake with the Dreamtime
domains out that way; it's too risky. Something stinks, Oshi. I think Ridgegap-47 is
targeted."

"Something is eating worlds?" Oshi felt a sudden urge to laugh: mild hysteria verging on
sweaty-palmed panic. "What do you mean?"

The Boss stepped down from the dais. Even at ground level, he loomed over her; a goat-
footed nightmare, the reified devil of a thousand mediaeval nightmares. "There are worse
things in the universe than Superbrights. Look at me."

Oshi looked up past his chest to meet his lurid gaze. Red light danced in his eyes. "What?"

"Look at me. Your kind created gods and demons to keep out the night. Later, when you
wanted a peg to hang your preconceptions on, you used such dreams to give shape to the
first Superbrights. Now you're stuck with us and you live in dread. But there are worse
things than us. The Ultrabrights, for instance. Complex Dreamtime entities from the
Centre. They're moving outwards slowly, but when they strike, worlds just drop off the
net. We don't know what they do with all that processing power but -- it's bad for
business. Certainly none of my kind would want to travel to areas where the Ultrabright
threat is at large. And so --"

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2: In the Duat