"Charles Stross - Love me" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Oshi lashed out with another arm, grabbing the smooth exterior of the Gatecoder module.
It was buttoned down, totally sealed -- someone had packed it up in anticipation of
trouble. " Thank you Raisa," she mumbled, tears rising and her stomach heaving in
noxious sympathy as she dragged at the heavy pod. Motors whined in her climb-spider as
she hauled it up onto her back and glanced round for signs of the tapeworm's return.
Raisa, she mourned. Why did you stay behind? Was it out of a sense of misplaced duty?
Or was it that she knew what would happen if she didn't shut down the gatecoder and they
needed it? The tapeworm acquires predator tactics from elsewhere, adding them to its
repertoire as it blindly seeks to convert all biomass in the colony into extensions of itself.
You don't stay behind after you've uploaded. There's not much left behind in your skull,
anyway. Raisa was safe. But whatever had taken control of her body had known how to
use it ...

Oshi stumbled out into the diseased night, crying and panting and trying not to think about
anything, hauling the hope of survival on her back.

The axial factories clustered around the hub of the colony, exposed to the vacuum of
space outside the pressurized habitat cylinder. Connected by hollow tubes, they resembled
a huge string of garlic hanging from one end of an oil drum. Beyond them hung the
docking bay: a vast bucket, open to space at one end. A school of tiny minnows clustered
in the bottom of the bucket, locked onto the unpressurized end wall of the colony.

Each minnow massed six thousand tons, empty: triple that when loaded with reaction
mass and payload. They were fusion rockets, complex assemblies of drive shields, fuel
tanks, payload platforms. Each ship was large enough to carry heavy mining equipment,
factories, aeromining assemblies, attack drones. There were eighty of them; all that was
left of Anubis's neglected planetary engineering fleet. They had been mothballed decades
ago, when the Superbright turned away from his mission to follow other, less material,
goals. The ships slumbered for years, their systems powered down, drawing parasite
power from the colony's grid. But now circumstances had changed, and the ships were
beginning to awaken.

Oshi was depressed. Every time she looked out at the empty eye socket of the colony she
saw a mirror to her dreams. The dim light filtering from the axial tube sprayed randomly
across a mute landscape with no sentience to illuminate it. Quirks of the ecostructure had
rendered it vulnerable to takeover by the right category of parasite: the tapeworm had


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4: Will you still love me ...

spread out, infiltrating every available niche, and the cylinder was slowly filling with a
haze of deathly-thick fog. The structure was degenerating, slowly turning into an
undifferentiated and simple predator as it eliminated all it's macroscopic rivals. That was
what it had been created for, after all: a biological weapon that had spun out of control. A
deadly gossamer cloud of fibres threaded the decomposing crust of buildings and soil in
the colony, leaking a pale yellow fluid across the sterilized ground.

But some parts of the colony were still hazardous. As soon as she'd reached the airlock
Oshi had triggered the decontamination cycle, searing everything outside her isolation suit