"Charles Stross - Red, Hot and Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

tried to ignore the itching in the back of his throat and the pain in his ears. Outside the
fuselage, four giant Turmanskii gas turbines howled across the tundra. The sky overhead
was the deep blue of an ice age. Pine trees clustered across the low-lying terrain to the
south, but the flight path of the jet was carrying Oleg ever closer to the Arctic circle.
How long will this take? He tried to calculate it in his head; assuming an air-speed of five
hundred knots, that would make it ... seven hours. Give or take. To the land of ice and
sky fire, where nuclear-powered pyramids brooded beneath the eternal sun. Vast,
many-tracked crawlers bearing fiery cylinders of nuclear death. Oceans of ice beneath
which submarines crept in cold-war pursuits. Ancient tribes of ice-dwelling hunters,
bemused by the entry of the modern world into their dream of ages, forced out of the
wire-wrapped military reservations. Solzhenitsyn had w

itten about the Gulag archipelago, the islands of prisoners locked in the sea of Siberia,
but this was something else. This was the continent of the military, gripped in the paranoid
embrance of an eternal winter of the soul.

I ought to stop them from doing it, Oleg told himself for the thousandth time. It was a
pathetic mantra, but repetition made it seem more practical; if only the sense of doing it
would not so stubbornly elude him ...

Up front, a door banged open. Oleg looked up; it was Anatoly, or whoever passed for
him. The shadows standing out beneath his high cheek-bones gave him a lupine
appearance. Oleg turned his head away and closed his eyes. His captor ignored this;
seconds later he sensed warm breath centimetres from his face.
"You don't have any choice in the matter, you know."

Oleg opened his eyes. "Don't I?" he asked.

Anatoly -- whoever he was -- seemed to find this amusing. "Avoid the end of the
universe? Huh!" He drew away a fraction and Oleg flinched, expecting a blow. It never
came. "We are not cruel, Professor. We are not the dark. Our intentions are good."

Oleg held up his chained wrists. "Then why ..?"

Anatoly shook his head slowly. "You don't understand. We can't afford to take any
chances. It has been many years since we tried and failed ... too long ago. Our German
colleagues who set the agenda at the Wannsee conference -- now they were evil. In
human terms, at least. But us? You do me a disservice." He leaned forward until he was
nose-to-nose with Oleg. "We are here to help you."

"Help me!" He snorted. "How?"

"Help you --" Anatoly paused for a moment -- "help you do what you didn't have the
guts to do on your own. Even though you've known how to do it for years, now ... even
though we gave you all the facilities you could possibly need. Don't play the innocent,
Professor. You know what I'm talking about."

"I do?" Oleg found himself unable to look away from Anatoly's dark eyes; the expression
on that face, the shared fear of the pit over which he had been walking these past years,
black as his worst fears ... "You really think that I can summon down the Dark?" His