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

The flight deck was a cramped cylinder two metres in diameter and five metres long. Free-
fall webs hung opposite a wall-sized screen; there were no physical controls. She
anchored herself at the mid-point and looked at it. At present the screen was feeding
through a view from the hull retinas; an expanse of grey hull metal. It was as if the ship
lay at the bottom of a well the size of a world, with stars visible in the sky beyond the top
of the shaft.

As she shuffled into place, a window blinked for attention. She stared at it in mild
annoyance, broken out of her reverie by the golden flash. "Yes?" she asked.

"Oshi." The voice didn't belong to Boris. She jolted upright, attentive.

"Who is it?" she asked, trying to sound calm. The screen cleared to show a pale face.
Raisa.

"Me, Oshi. I wondered if you were lonely."


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4: Will you still love me ...

Oshi bit back an acid reply, recognising her agressive sarcasm for what it was. "Not
particularly," she said as casually as possible, trying to drown the thunder of her heart in a
well of calm.

"Then maybe your biotelemetry is lying. How's it been?"

She stared at Raisa's image. "What do you expect me to say? Do you remember what
happened, or did anyone tell you?" Her mask slipped for a second and her reflection
shimmered in the screen, naked in its anger and pain. "I saw your corpse. The tapeworm
tried to use it as a lure for me." She stared at her until her image blurred again: with
growing surprise she realised that the problem was not in the screen but in her tear ducts.

"Oshi, what can I say?" Raisa's tone of sympathy sounded transparently insincere; Oshi
wondered for a moment what she'd seen in the woman. She felt curiously distant from her
emotions as she watched her.

"You can start by not saying anything about it," she suggested. "If you had anything else
you wanted to talk about ..."

She hesitated for a second or two. "I did," Raisa said. "But it's also about what we're
doing. About the plan."

"Yes, well. So you've got plans. Who hasn't?" Oshi tried to keep sarcasm out of her voice.

"Stop fooling. I mean the long-term plan, Oshi, where we're all going. Out of this system
-- the stuff Boris is feeding us. There's a problem. I don't see how the hell we're going to
get away with it in the long term. You follow me?"

"Yes. But if all goes well we will meet in another two months, in the flesh. Maybe we can