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

talk about it then?"

"Oshi!" Raisa's face twisted with exasperation. "It's not like that. I'm not doing this to
mess up your ego! Look, I'm trying to help everybody. Not just in the colony, but outside
it; everyone. Hijacking a starship is cool. It may work ... but what then? We're going to be
sitting at ground zero. The Superbrights will try to stop us. If what you told me is true ...
where do we go from here? Your old masters won't take kindly to a starship full of
renegades spreading the news of their crimes. Have you ever seen what happens when
someone declares war on the Superbrights?"

She paused expectantly. Oshi felt himself gripped by a nauseous tension. "I can't do
anything about that yet, Raisa. Got too much to think about as it is. Maybe later?"


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4: Will you still love me ...

"They'll have booby-trapped the colony. Somehow. They're insidious. Even if they never
heard of us, there'll be some kind of trap."

Oshi shrugged. "Who the fuck knows? We'll find out soon enough. Look, maybe we'll
somewhere outside the sphere, where they can't get us. Where we can build a new world
free of interference by predator intelligences. Or maybe we should stay on the ship, tip it
onto a one-way trip into the future, trade real-space time for virtual colony space. But until
we've got the starship it doesn't matter."

"Oshi?"

"Yes?"

"Why do you hate me?"

They stared at each other in silence for a minute: Oshi too surprised to speak, Raisa
waiting for an answer.

"Hate you? But I don't ..."

Coloured static filled the screen. Oshi stared in disbelief. She cut me dead, she realized.
The cow! She stabbed at a manual control with stiff fingers. She thinks I hate her? The
thought was so odd that Oshi almost laughed aloud. Then another thought occurred to her,
with all the clarity and force of an electric shock. What if she's right?

Bite the bullet, Oshi thought, ironically. Or the ice pick. She looked at her hand. It shook
slightly. Thirty days; is that all it takes? She was feeling weak, weak from lack of
company. No-one to talk to; no-one at all. She hadn't seen another real, live, human face
for nearly five weeks now. She looked up. Above her head the wallscreen blocked out a
horizon of stars. Dumb indicators blinked, a constellation of emergency displays hard-
wired into the ships control network.

"Ready?" she asked.