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

Him. He knows ... Mikhail. Only he's dead, isn't he? Now who could have killed him? Three guesses.

I wish I paid more attention when I found I was talking to myself. But you're gone now, aren't you? My
murderous passenger, what are you? A fragment of Boss's overmind? Damn, I should have listened to
your mumbling. But I was afraid. Going crazy in the solitude of the axial redoubt. Maybe you were going
crazy faster than I was, else you wouldn't have felt the need to talk. Superbrights need company to stay
sane. Only now you've found another host ... and you're making sure we don't escape to put a spanner in
your works.

I'd be angry if I wasn't so frightened.

The air in the capsule is growing stale, humid and close and breathy. I breath through my nostrils, alert for
smells. Stale food, sweat, the acrid scent of tension. I tap the ceiling softly, trying to find the support
stanchion. Got it. There's a hard runner under my fingertips, metallic-cold, nothing like the warm live
wood of Salazar Station. I cling to it with fingertips, slowly stretch my body, drag myself up until toes
brace ceiling and my sense of direction flips.

I'm a fly. I crawl along the roof, inverted in total darkness, listening to the breathy rasp and twitch of my
companions. The ceiling is cool, vibrating softly to my touch. Like an intelligent insect, I anticipate an
unseen swatter: my heart tumbles and coils in my mouth, pulse pounding in my ears. I brush aside the
dangling restraint straps that lace the room like an invisible spiderweb. Ignore the white-noise wisdom.
My eyes go self-test, one two three four, flash through primary and fusion colours ...

Ouch. Fingers. Something hard raps me across the knuckles. I feel around with my right hand, trying to
work it out: my toes, meanwhile, I grip the stanchion. Somewhere around here there's an equipment
locker with tools in it. A doorframe. My fingernails skitter across slick metal, recessed behind a gasket.
It's shut. Hey --

I feel my way round the side of the door. I slide gently, fingers gliding close to the wall. Something bumps
against my back, drifts away again snorting: I tense, but it's just a deactivated drone. I guess even the
autopilot -- Trotsky -- is side-tracked by the monotonous humming of the download process.

There are handles, a thin rapping noise when I tap the wall -- I scrabble, hunting. Leverage, damn, let
me get my legs round ... yes. It slides open smoothly as if on rails, a thin panel drawer. There are things
in it --

Light.

There's a pale glow in the back of the drawer. I see shapes, shadows stark as blindness against the green
emergency bioluminescence. My vision is hazy, tears globbed onto my eyelashes from relief: I'm not ill,
it's all right ... or wrong, but I'm intact, that's true. I grab for the boxy pack clipped next to the airmask.
It's warm, plasticky, and as I lift it out it chirps: " Security. Identify yourself. Authorisation
:"

"Oshi Adjani," I say.

" Authorisation inadequate. Alert: this unit is being stolen. Help! "

I blink at it, damn the white noise -- then realise only I can hear it. It's yelling inside my head. Something,