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

glands and limbs and senses. She let her face slip into neutral, trying to give nothing away.
Maybe I can escape later she thought. Difficult but not impossible to fake a citizen wisdom
interface as well as skin, visual recognition ... something slid into place in her head, some
tiny component of glacial stillness, and she was back in charge again. Should escape for


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (27 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58
2: In the Duat

however long it takes to link up with the resistance and get their side of the story.
Whoever they are. She could sense their presence; the existence of the Goon Squad
implied some kind of armed threat to the status quo.

A sudden gust of cold air told her they were outside the built up area before her captor
jinked sideways in a curious flowing motion, bouncing through a gateway on many-
jointed legs. The grass glowed pale red with the heat from below: small creatures froze or
dived for cover as the Goon Squad sprinted past. There were trees to either side, modified
mangroves and the soil support plants that kept the environment ticking over. Dusty
brown soil and stones jumbled underfoot as the Squad pounded uphill. There was
something ahead: Oshi tensed even before her captors began to slow.

Flip -- she was upright, still clenched breathlessly tight in appendages. Her abductor
raised her towards it's face. She couldn't help it: she flinched, cringed, tried to pull her
head back from the monster.

" Ill Duce see you NOW!" it screeched at her, drool spraying from its mandibles. The end-
wall of the colony bulked vast and faceless behind it, a slab of metal stretching vertically
into the sky. It glowed a dim orange to her infra-red sight. A door appeared in the wall,
needles of darkness growing outwards with silent speed, fracturing into chilly night. The
Squaddie whirled backwards in a storm of bony legs, yanking her with it into the darkness
beyond. A rill of static clamped down on all her senses, flaying perceptions into fragments
of knife-edged pain and fear. Her body seemed to do a fast dissolve from the inside out,
coring her as cleanly as a drill: her last thought before it happened was the walls, they're
full of bones

Peace.

Oshi awakened. She tried to open her eyes, winced at the stab of pain that sparkled
through her skull. She tried again, one eye then the other. She was lying on her back,
looking up at a curved ceiling painted with miniature fields and groves of tiny trees. The
wall beside her was bare steel, streaked orange with rust; it met the ceiling in an arch high
above. A huge grey lump of stone protruded from it, bisecting her view of the ceiling. A
tiny wisp of haze drifted across the roof above it.

She turned her head. The floor she was lying on dropped away beside her. Sudden vertigo:
her head swam as she looked up and saw, not a painted ceiling, but the real fields that
lined the other side of the colony cylinder, many kilometres overhead.

Oshi sat up, slightly nauseous in the low gravity of the near-hub region. About point one
of a gee, she estimated. Where have they gone? Things came clear; she was on a narrow