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

stomach turned over, a vast uneasy sense of urgency growing inside him. His heart raced,
and the handcuffs slid around his slippery wrists as if on a thin coating of slime.

Anatoly leaned close to him. "I know you can, Oleg. Because you want to do it, don't
you? Otherwise you'd have turned me in long ago, to that chekist major you can't leave
alone, you think we don't know about that?"

Anatoly's face rippled slowly before Oleg's eyes, twisting into another shape that it had
worn for a long time before it's owner had chosen to pass for a student; a visage at once
familiar and frightening. "I know you better than you think, Comrade Academician. You
like your cosy office too much, and you're still afraid of the dark the way they taught you
to be. But part of you wants to get it over with very badly, doesn't it? You don't like
human people, although you try to hide it -- isn't that so? You don't even like your own
kind very much. So you crouch in dark corners and search frantically for the key to the
thing that scares you most, telling yourself that you need the information in order to hide
better -- such nonsense! I'll tell you what you wanted to know. You wanted to work out
where the Dark had gone, in those long aeons since it first came, while the sun swung
around the core of the galaxy -- isn't that right? -- because you knew better than most of
us where the technology was leading the

umans."

Anatoly-Andrei turned sinuously and sat down beside Oleg. Oleg stared, trying to fix
ever tiny detail in his mind: the pores in Andrei's skin, the faint, acrid smell of the kin, the
slight, nervous way he fidgeted with his left hand. Andrei stared back, eyes wide in a
display of inhuman concern.
"Another twenty years and their geneticists, they'll be able to pin us down everywhere.
Have you thought of that? It would mean the end of us, the end of everything. But not if
we have the guts to do what we should do, and use those three thousand megawatts, no?
If we get our blow in first, we can be safe again. All of us. To sleep away another age
without fear of interruption by the hairless apes." Andrei -- visibly Andrei now, still as
youthful as when Oleg had first met him in the mid-sixties -- stared like an obsessive, fear
and calculation mingled in his gaze. "Isn't that right?" he asked. "Don't you know it's true?
We can't let them carry on --"

"You're --" Oleg stopped, at a loss for words. He thinks he knows everything. Andrei
blinked rapidly, as if looking for a further justification.

"The function systems, Professor. We've seen your interest in Lyupanov space and chaos
theory. We even heard about those programs you ran -- after you erased them and
shredded the results. We can guess. You know exactly how to go about summoning the
dark; where to point the antennae, what message to send, how long it will take. The
radar site at Krasnoyarsk interested you, so we guessed. Big, powerful transmitters.
That's it, isn't it? You are our people's only hope, now."

"Why? I don't understand. What's in it for you?"

"Nothing, probably. Freedom from fear." Andrei shrugged, suddenly abashed. "Come
now, professor. We're all afraid together, aren't we? Those who think the Dark will kill
us, and those -- like you -- who fear it but understand the need. I just --" he sighed and