"Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

had a family space: four sleeping pods and a two-by-three living room with inflatable furniture. It would
be home for the voyage. They were to eat in the canteen on Rose Deck, bathe in the communal hygiene
unit on Tulip, and count themselves lucky for being alive at all—unlike Mica and her husband, friends
and neighbors who'd been home on a month's leave for the first time in five years when the Incident took
place.
Within hours, Wednesday had been bored silly. Her plants were dead, her nerve garden shut down for
cold storage, and they had been ordered to remain in steerage until after departure, with nothing but the
inane prattle of the entertainment net and the ship's lobotomized media repository for company. Some
budding genius from New Dresden—a more regimented society than Moscow's—had decided that
horror interactives and books were unfit for minors, and slapped a parental control on that section of the
database. Her friends—those she counted as friends—were mostly on the other ships. Even Herman had


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 IRON SUNRISE - Charles Stross


told her he'd be unable to talk after the ship's first jump. It would have been more fun if they'd had cold
sleep tankage, but there was no way that the station's facilities could process more than a couple of
hundred at a time: so Wednesday was to be a martyr to boredom for the next week.
The only consolation was that she had a whole new world to explore—a starship. She hadn't been on a
ship since she was eight, and the itch to put learning into practice was irresistible. Besides, Herman said
he knew and could show her the layout of this particular vessel. It was a late-model Backhoe series
heavy lifter fabricated in the yards over Burgundy, with life-support superstructure by Thurn und Taxis
Pty of New Dresden. It was just a trash hauler—fusion rockets, contrarotating spin wheels—nothing as
sophisticated as a momentum transfer unit or grav generators. Its jump module was a sealed unit
purchased from someplace where they knew how to make such things; neither Dresden nor Moscow had
the level of tech infrastructure necessary to throw naked singularities around. But Herman knew his way
around the ship, and Wednesday was bored. So obviously it was time to go exploring; and when she told
him, he had some interesting suggestions for where to go.
Wednesday was lousy at staying out of locked rooms. Her second-year tutor had summed it up: "She's
like a cat—takes a shut door as a personal insult." She took her pick gun and tablet with her as a matter
of course, not out of malice or a desire to burgle, but simply because she couldn't abide not knowing
what lay on the far side of a door. (The ship had a double-walled hull, and the only doors that breached
into vacuum were airlocks. Unless she was stupid enough to pick a door with flashing pressure warning
lights, heavy gaskets, and mechanical interlocks, she wasn't running any risks. Or so she thought … )
The ship wasn't exactly off-limits to passengers, but she had a feeling her presence would be
discouraged if anyone noticed her. So she sneaked up into the central service axis and back down into
the crew ring the smart way: sitting on the roof of a powered elevator car, her stiction pads locked to the
metal as it swam up the tunnel, decelerating and shedding angular momentum. She rode it up and down
twice, searching for ventilation ducts with the aid of a torch, before she made her move. She swam
through darkened service shafts, down another tube, hitched a lift on the roof of a passenger car, and
surfed all the way into one of the main ventilation bronchi. The maintenance moles in the airflow system
left her alone, because she was alive and moving, which was just as well, really. After an hour of
hobbiting around in the ducts she was tired and a bit disoriented—and it was then that she came across
the filtration hood that Herman had told her to expect.
It sat in the floor of a cramped duct, humming softly to itself, laminar pumps blurring quietly in the
twilight. A faint blue glow of ultraviolet lamps shone from the edges. Fascinated, she bent close to
inspect it. Sterilizers aboard a star-ship? Only in the life-support system, as a rule. But this was the