"Stross, Charles - Ancient Of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

A ringing tone cut the air: he forced himself not to pick up the receiver. It gave out a second ring before the answering machine cut in. The voice at the other end of the line was faint, as if its owner was shouting down a buried pipe.
"Hello, is this –"
"This is Susan speaking. I'm sorry I can't come to the phone right now, but if you'd like to leave a message, please speak after the tone."
"– Oskar speaking. Call me back." Click.
Kris picked up his cigarette. He felt a little ill at the prospect of what he was about to do, but he couldn't see what alternative there was. For Helena, sure: for these two kids who'd gotten themselves into a whole lot more trouble than they'd dreamed of, too. For the pair of hitters Ancient of Days had sent round – but they were beyond sympathy, beyond regrets. No, it was the fact that what he was about to do was irrevocable that made him sick with worry; him, who'd seen men eating each other on the Eastern Front and other things too terrible to talk about.
He picked up the phone and began to dial, careful not to enter any wrong digits.
Oskar picked up the phone on the fourth ring. It was three in the morning in Berlin and Kris could imagine the crumpled beer cans on the floor, smoke curling beneath the ceiling and the oil from the black metal-machined parts scattered across the newspaper pages on the sofa. "Hello?"
"Oskar, this is Kris. I have a candidate." His mouth was dry and his throat burned from the cigarettes, but that wasn't why his heart was pounding.
Oskar grunted. "After all this time? Are you sure?"
"You better believe it. The location is –" he gave directions. "You'll need to bring tools. And watch out, you'd better be clean. It's already gone critical; we had a securitate airhead trying to scare the canaries earlier this evening."
"A what? They must be crazy!"
"No way. He was travelling under falsies, ID of Ivan Salazar from the Langley entity, but that wasn't his real name at all. I fingered him on a liaison job oh, years ago. He was one of us, but shit sticks if you roll in it for long enough. I figure he's one of the ones who skipped out after they fragged the Ceaucescus during the coup, maybe figured he could cut it as a wet operative for the Families. Anyway, it's really hit the fan this time. We're talking a Hummingbird situation; got that?"
There was silence from the other end of the line as Oskar absorbed this information. "Yes, but which side are we on?" he finally asked.
Kris froze. "The winners," he said slowly and deliberately. "Spread the word. We've got a Hummingbird situation, here and now. Get the wagon rolling then hop the next flight out of Tempelhof. We need you on the job."
"Check," replied Oskar. "The fuses have been lit. Good luck and goodbye."
The phone went dead, but Kris didn't put it down. The sound from the buzzing receiver was unlocking memories from his childhood, stories he'd been told by his mother about what happened to his uncle Hans in the terrible night of the first Operation Hummingbird, uncle Hans with his proud brown uniform and Stormtrooper strut who had vanished in the night of the Long Knives, never to be seen again. Is this how it happens? he wondered; must the young always eat the old? His palm sweated as he squeezed the smooth plastic of the receiver. It wasn't always like this among our people. There was a time when the gap wasn't so wide. It didn't have to grow this way, did it? But he'd set the wheels in motion and now there was only one way out: and death was an integral part of the process.
Helena was clearing up in the kitchen when she sensed somebody standing behind her. She straightened up and thrust a blood-stained wedge of kitchen roll into the waste disposer then rolled off her soiled rubber gloves before turning round. It was Sue, looking pale but collected and wearing a thick dressing gown that was too big for her. "How do you feel?" she asked.
"Not bad, considering." Sue breathed deeply. "Mind if I ask your name again? I didn't catch it before." She looked around distractedly, but not down, never down. She looked as if she was trying to walk on air. Helena was still a long way from finishing.
"That's all right; my name's Helena," she replied. "And you're Sue. Look, are you sure you ought to be up? That was –"
Sue waved a hand. "I'm tougher than I look. And so is Eric, I think. He'll be fine and so will I. But he –" she looked at the body lying on the mat of newspapers Helena had spread on the floor – "he's not going anywhere. I think we deserve an explanation."
Helena sighed. "You're not getting one here. I'm in this over my head, I just tagged along for the ride." She laughed self-consciously. How could she possibly justify what she was doing on the kitchen floor? Then she frowned. "Look, I'm not explaining this very well, am I? Kris and I thought you could, could do with some help. We weren't expecting things to have gone this far, not yet."
"Uh huh." Sue nodded, glanced down queasily, then turned round and fumbled in one of the cupboards above the work surface. "I need a drink. How about you?"
"That's –" Helena paused – "a kind offer." She rummaged in the cupboards for a minute then found two tall glasses and filled them half-full with rum. It wasn't Helena's favourite spirit, but she took it all the same. "You've been very lucky so far. Ancient of Days probably doesn't realise how isolated she is. The oldest ones –" she took a sip of rum – "seldom do."
"Who is this Ancient of Days?" Sue asked. Helena looked at her sharply.
"Exactly what her name implies. The one I – help me – am sworn to serve." She took another sip, then a mouthful of the neat spirits. It burned in her stomach, like the dull fire of revenge. "One of Us, left over from a former age. She serves the Families by searching out threats to our collective survival. But in latter days she's become ... unreliable."
"Hence ... this?" Sue asked. "You mean she thought she could simply order us to kill all the scientists working on homoeobox structure and the rest would lose interest or be too frightened to continue working in the field?" She finished on a note of disbelief.
"That's about the size of it," Helena admitted.
"What does she think we are? A bunch of medieval alchemists?" Sue downed her glass in one gulp and slammed it on the work top. "Jesus Christ!"
Helena didn't say anything.
"It's a complete sack of shit!" Sue exclaimed. "Scientists don't work like that, hiding dingy secrets from each other and bolting at shadows! All it would take would be two, maybe three suspicious incidents and we'd have every police agency in Europe breathing down our necks. What does she think she's doing?"
"Protecting us," Helena said drily.
Sue glared at her. "And what are you doing?"
Helena sighed. "Protecting you, I think. Times change, and the Ancients can't adapt. For most of our history responses which worked a century ago have been valid today. But not any longer. You – your generation – are our future. You don't need to exist on the edge of human society, you can slot right in with them! But in the process –" she shrugged.
"But what's in it for you?" Sue looked agitated, uncertain whether to be grateful or suspicious or angry. "Why are you helping us? You said you were sworn to serve her! What are you doing here?" She sounded deceptively close to hysteria.
"Cleaning up after the party," Helena said calmly as she bent down and picked up the electric carving knife again. It was strange how little blood there was, she noted. As if weerde tissue fluid clotted far faster than human; and the bullets had been low-calibre. "For what I'm doing now, the punishment would have been forgetfulness," she added. "To have one's very name expunged from the memories of all who one held dear, to be cast out into the wilderness on pain of death, there to wander through the empty forests until even the memory of speech faded and one was nothing more than a beast." She glanced up. "But that doesn't mean very much to your generation, does it? You've grown up among the urban sapiens, after all, and they do things differently." She shook her head. "I wish I knew where it was all going."
Sue didn't reply, but a moment later Helena felt her crouch down beside her, and there was another pair of hands to help expunge the evidence of the crime.

***

Oskar caught the red-eye shuttle out of Tempelhof. It was delayed three hours by snow, and when it lumbered into the cold dawn sky the outline of the redundant Wall was clearly visible on the ground below. Less than two hours later he was landing in the City. Somebody was waiting for him.
Howard was already in the country, running a high-value high-risk shipping agency from a motel bedroom near Milton Keynes. When his brokers discovered he was gone they were furious: but not as furious as they were three minutes later when the Special Branch broke down their door. But Howard wasn't around to care. Now he was a truck driver called Mark, and within a day even his fingerprints wouldn't match on Interpol's files.
Fiona got the call when she returned to her lodge in the Pyrenees after a good day's skiing. She fobbed off her current boyfriend with a tale of an elderly aunt and a stroke, made an air connection out of Toulouse, and caught the Chunnel link from Paris.
Frederico didn't head for the City. But then, that wasn't his target. His target was in the Vatican. There were a hundred others in the Organisation who, like him, weren't heading for the City; but all of them had targets. And when they reached them, the targets would be dead.
It was agreed within the Organisation that a purge was long overdue. It would have been sensible to have held one during the turbulence of the second world war, when it was already becoming obvious who was unreliable and who was trustworthy, but back then the Organisation had still been weak, a compact of like-minded weerde who understood the ways of the modern human world less imperfectly than their forebears. Therefore the Organisation lay low, recruited individuals disaffected with the way of the Families, and waited.
Times changed. The war ended, and with the falling of the iron curtain came opportunities for expansion and re-entrenchment. The Organisation made very good use of them. The Ancients, however, were oblivious to the fundamental changes in the world at large; their response to the Cold War was identical to their response to the British and Spanish empires, the Romans, Alexander the Great ... it was a practised response, and it had worked before. But unfortunately, some times changed faster than others.

***

Eric opened his eyes and blinked until the ceiling swam into focus. Bullet wound. I never thought it would hurt like this. More like ... he tried to clear bloodstained drill-bits from his mind's eye. He felt weak, drained, but fine, except for the bruising ache in his left arm. He tried to sit up and the arm almost exploded; he gasped and forced himself to hold still until the pain passed. Then, very carefully, he propped himself up against the headboard and began to explore the damage inside.
Torn muscles grated against one another, sending surges of pain up those nerve trunks that had not been severed by the bullet. A fibrous matrix of clotted blood had spread through the tissue around the ruptured vein, holding cells in stasis while the complex machineries of his immune system went to work. Already the first new cells were infiltrating the mass, spreading along the boundary of ripped flesh and commencing the job of reconstruction. Eric concentrated; without guidance the wound would heal badly. There might even be a scar. He was still tired, and his head ached, but it was essential that he –