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

with short-wavelength ultraviolet: when she was sure the lock was sterile, she'd thermite-
welded the lock door shut. The tapeworm assimilates the tactics of its victims. What it had
done with the Raisa-puppet haunted her dreams, shaking her awake in a cold choking
panic. First vocalization, then intelligence ... where would it stop? She used the axial
control nexus to trace all the other airlocks opening onto the interior of the colony: then
welded them shut and shorted out the control circuits. She set up monitor programs,
watching every corner of the axial redoubt and the hub factories. Her dreams were
haunted by decaying bodies in gashed space-suits, writhing with white coiled life. If the
worm learned how to space walk before she was ready to launch ...

I'll have to destroy the colony, she realised, grimly watching its progress through external
video eyes. To sterilise this infection will take more than antibiotics. Whatever was left of
Raisa had tried tetrodotoxin, just about the most lethal neurotoxin known: it hadn't
worked. And the worm was learning, using lures. It talked to her over the comm if she let
it, stringing together nonsensical invitations and threats, fronting faces from which the
grey flesh dripped in slow-melting ropes. She blinked slowly. It could be worse. Lorma
could have used nanoassemblers. Grey goop syndrome ... runaway nanorobots would have
converted the entire colony into a bloom of furiously replicating molecular monsters by
now. But the tapeworm was less efficient, and less predictable. It might still have a nasty
surprise in store for her, and this was a risk she was not prepared to expose herself to.

The axial territories outside the biosphere were safe for Oshi as long as she observed
biohazard precautions. One morning she visited a pressurised module she'd set up in one
of the huge freight elevators that connected the factory sections to the docking station. She
travelled by spider, externally sterilised, airlocks copulating and pulsing with plastic
flexibility in the variable pressure zones. She let it suck her through a succession of
claustrophobic chambers, the airflow whispering sweet nothings to her. She remembered
-- couldn't forget -- Raisa: if it has truly become intelligent -- what of the real woman?

Days before, she'd cloned the gatecoder firmware and despatched the specification to the
factories for duplication. Eighty payload pallets were under construction, sized for the
docking adapters of the ghost fleet. She'd worked it out with Boris and Mik, a ghostly
telconference that had lasted nearly a day in realtime as they politely, almost
ritualistically, waited for the thirty-second lag in communication. Each gatecoder would

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4: Will you still love me ...


handle a dozen clone-and-download cases simultaneously, which should be enough. There
was a limit, after all, to the number of attack drones the factories could build with the
available materials. With all the uploads in the Pascal dreamtime, they had more than
enough pilots for the combat craft ...

A squishing of soft gaskets and a clicking of latches bought her back to full awareness.
Yawning, her ears popping from the pressure differential, Oshi pulled herself hand-over-
hand into the cramped, dim-lit space of the factory. It was building a duplicate gatecoder,
unpacked and expanded for operational status. Placentory airlocks covered the walls of the
control room, lending it an appearance like the inside of an insect's compound eye. Behind
them the automated nanofactories worked in a haze of straw-coloured fluid, reconstructing