"Williams,.Walter.Jon.-.Hardwired" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

"What does he want for it?" she asks. Daud shrugs. Sarah crouches and looks down at him. She feels a tightness in her throat.
She repeats her question.
"Jackstraw will be in the next room," he says. "If anything goes wrong, he'll know."
"He's a thatch, isn't he?"
She can see the Adam's apple bob as Daud swallows. He nods silently. She takes a breath and watches him strain against the weights. Then he sits up. His eyes are cold.
"You don't have to do this," she says.
"It's a lot of money," he repeats.
"Tomorrow my job will be over," she says. "It'll pay enough for a long time, almost enough for a pair of tickets out."
He shakes his head, then springs to his feet and turns his back. He walks toward the shower. "I don't want your money," he says. "Your tickets, either."
"Daud," she says. He whirls around and she can see his anger.
"Your job!" he spits. "You think I don't know what it is you do?"
She rises from her crouch, and for a moment she can see fear in his eyes. Fear of her? A wedge of doubt enters her mind.
"You know what I do, yes," she says. "You also know why."
"Because some man went thatch once," he says. "And because when you got loose you killed him and liked it. I know the stories on the street."
She feels a constriction in her chest. She shakes her head slowly. "No," she says. "It's for us, Daud. To get us out, into the Orbitals." She comes up to him to touch him, and he flinches. She drops her hand. "Where it's clean, Daud," she says. "Where we're not in the street, because there isn't a street. "
Daud gives a contemptuous laugh. "There isn't a street there?" he asks. "So what will we do, Sarah? Punch code in some little office?" He shakes his head. "No, Sarah," he says. "We'd do what we've always done. But it will be for them, not for us."
"No," she says. "It'll be different. Something we haven't known. Something finer."
"You should see your eyes when you say that," Daud says. "Like you've just put a needle in your veins. Like that hope is your drug, and you're hooked on it." He looks at her soberly, all his anger gone. "No, Sarah," he says. "I know what I am, and what you are. I don't want your hope, or your tickets. Especially tickets with blood on them." He turns away again, and her answer comes quick and angry, striking for his weakness, for the heart. Like a weasel.
"You don't mind stealing my bloody endorphins, I've noticed," she says. His back stiffens for a moment, then he walks on. Heat stings Sarah's eyes. She blinks back tears. "Daud," she says. "Don't go with a thatch. Please."
He pauses at the door, hand on the jamb. "What's the difference?" he asks. "Going with a thatch, or living with you?"
The door closes and Sarah can only stand and fight a helpless war with her anger and tears. She spins and stalks into her room. Her hardwired nerves are crackling, the adrenaline triggering her reflexes, and she only stops herself from trying to drive a fist through the wall. She can taste death on her tongue, and wants to run the Weasel as fast as she can.
The holograph of Princess sits on her chest of drawers. She takes it and stares at it; seeing the creamy shoulders, the blue innocence in the eyes, an innocence as false as Daud's.

TOMORROW/NO

Sarah and Princess follow the ambulance men out of the Aujourd'Oui. They are carrying the girl from the washroom stall. She has clawed her cheeks and breasts with her fingernails. Her face is a swollen cloud of bruises, her nose blue pulp; her lips are split and bloody. She is still trying to weep, but lacks the strength.
Sarah can see Princess's excitement glittering in her eyes. This is the touch of the world she craves, warm and sweaty and real, flavored with the very soil of old Earth. Princess stands on the hot sidewalk, while her dirtboys circle and call for the cars. Sarah puts her arm around her and whispers in her ear, telling her what Sarah knows she wants. "I am your dream. "
"My name is Danica," Princess says.
In the back of the car there is a smell of sweat and expensive scent. Sarah begins to devour Danica, licking and biting and breathing her in. She left the silicon spray at home but won't be needing it: Danica has Daud's eyes and hair and smooth flesh, and Sarah finds herself wanting to touch her, to make a feast of her.
The car passes smoothly through gates of hardened alloy, and they are in the nest. None of Cunningham's people ever got this far. Danica takes Sarah's hand and leads her in. A security man insists on a check: Sarah looks down at him with a contemptuous stare and spreads the wings of her jacket, letting his electronic marvel scout her body: She knows Weasel is undetectable by these means. The boy confiscates her hardfire inhaler. Fine: it is made so as not to acquire fingerprints. "What are these?" he asks, holding up the hard black cubes of liquid crystal, ready for insertion into a comp deck.
"Music," she says. He shrugs and gives them back. Princess takes her hand again and leads her up a long stair.
Her room is soft and azure. She laughs and lies back on sheets that match her eyes, arms outstretched. Sarah bends over and laps at her. Danica moans softly, approving. She is an old man and a powerful one, and Sarah knows this game. His job is to rape Earth, to be as strong as spaceborn alloy, and it is weakness that is his forbidden thing, his pornography. To put his bright new body into the hands of a slave is a weakness he wants more than life itself.
"My dream," Danica whispers. Her fingers trace the scars on Sarah's cheek, her chin.
Sarah takes a deep breath. Her tongue retracts into Weasel's implastic housing, and the cybersnake's head closes over it. She rolls Danica entirely under her, holding her wrists, molding herself to the old man's new girl body. She presses her mouth to Danica's, feeling the flutter of the girl's tongue, and then Weasel strikes, telescoping from its hiding place in Sarah's throat and chest. Sarah holds her breath as her elastic artificial trachea constricts. Danica's eyes open wide as she feels the touch of Weasel in her mouth, the temperature of Sarah's body but somehow cold and brittle. Sarah's fingers clamp on her wrists, and Princess gives a birth-strangled cry as Weasel's head forces its way down her throat. Her body bucks once, again, her breath warm in Sarah's face. Weasel keeps uncoiling, following its program, sliding down into the stomach, its sensors questing for life. Daud's eyes make desperate promises. Princess moans in fear, using his strength against Sarah's weight, trying to throw her off. Sarah holds him crucified. Weasel, turning back on itself as it enters Danica's stomach, tears its way out, seeks the cava inferior and shreds it. Danica makes bubbling sounds, and though Sarah knows it is impossible, although she knows her tongue is still retracted deep into Weasel's base, Sarah thinks she can taste blood. Weasel follows the vein to Danica's heart. Sarah holds her down, her own chest near bursting with lack of air, until the struggling stops and Daud's blue eyes grow cloudy and die.
Purple and black rim Sarah's vision. She heaves herself off the bed, partly retracting Weasel as she gasps for air through the constricted passage in her throat. She stumbles for the washroom, falls and crashes into the sink. The impact drives the air from her. Her hands turn the spigots. Her hands put Weasel in the sink and feel the water running chill. Her breath comes in rasps. Weasel is coated with a gel that supposedly prevents blood and matter from adhering, but she doesn't want even a chance of Danica's flesh in her mouth. The cybersnake is tearing at her breast. The water thunders until she can feel nothing but the speed with which she is falling into blackness, and then she falls back and sucks Weasel into her and can breathe again and taste the cool and healing air.
Her chest heaves up and down, and her eyes are still full of darkness. She knows Daud is dead and that she has a task. She whips her head back and forth and tries to clear it, tries to scrabble upward from the brink, but Weasel is eating her heart and she can scarcely think from the pain. Sarah can hear herself whimper. She can feel the prickle of the carpet against the back of her neck as she raises her arms above her head and tries to drag herself along, crawling away, crawling, while Weasel throbs like thunder in her chest and she thinks she can hear her heart crack.
Sarah comes to herself slowly, and the black circle fades from her sight. She is lying on her back and the water is still roaring in the sink. She sits up and clutches at her throat. Weasel, having fed, is at rest. She crawls back to the sink and turns the spigots off. Grasping them, she hauls herself to her feet. She still has work to do.
In her room, Princess is spread-eagled on the bed. Dead, it is easier to see the old man in her. Sarah's stomach turns over. She should drag Princess across the bed and tuck her under the covers, delaying the moment when they find her, but she can't bring herself to touch the cooling flesh; and instead she turns her eyes away and steps into the next room.
She pauses as her eyes adjust to the dim light, and listens to the house. Silence. She reads the amber lights above her vision, and can find only routine broadcasts. Sarah takes a pair of gloves from her belt pouch and walks to the room's comp deck. She flicks it on, then opens the trapdoor and takes from her pouch one of the liquid-crystal music cubes Cunningham has given her. She puts it in the trapdoor and waits for the deck to signal her.
The cube would, in fact, have played music had anyone else used it. Sarah has the code to convert it to something else. The READY signal appears.
She taps the keys in near-silence as she enters the codes. A pale light flashes in the corner of the screen: RUNNING. She leans back in her chair and sighs.
Princess was a courier, bringing from orbit a liquid-crystal cube filled with complex instructions, instructions her company dared not trust even to coded radio transmissions. Princess would not have known what she carried, though presumably it contained inventory data, strategies for manipulating the market, instructions to subordinates, buying and selling strategies. Information worth millions to any competitor. The crystal cube would have been altered to a new configuration once the information was removed to the company computer-a computer sealed against any outside tampering, but which could presumably be accessed through the terminals in the corporate suites.
Sarah also has no clear idea what is on the cube she is carrying. Some kind of powerful theft program, she presumes, to break its way through the barriers surrounding the information so that it can be copied. She does not know how good her program is, whether it's setting off every alarm in Florida or whether it's accomplishing its business stealthily. If it's very good, it will not only copy the information, but alter it as well, planting a flow of disinformation at the heart of the enemy code, perhaps even altering the instructions as well, sabotaging the enemy's marketing patterns.
While the RUNNING light blinks, Sarah stands and goes over every part of the suite she might have touched, stroking anything that could retain a print with her gloved fingertips. The house, and Princess, are silent.
It is eleven minutes before the computer signals READY. Sarah extracts the cube and returns it to her belt. She has been told to wait a few hours, but there is someone dead in the next room and every nerve screams at her to run. She sits before the comp deck and puts her head between her legs, gulping air. For some reason she finds herself trembling. She battles the adrenaline and her own nerves, and thinks of the tickets, the cool dark of space with the blue limb of Earth far below, forever out of reach.
In two hours she calls a cab and walks down the cold, echoing stair. The security man nods at her as she walks out: his job is to keep people from coming in, not to hinder their leaving. He even gives her the inhaler back.
She takes a dozen cabs to a dozen different places, leaving the satin jacket in one, cinching her waist in tighter and removing the suspenders in another, in a third reversing her T-shirt and her belt pouch, both now glowing yellow like a warning light. The jockey persona is gone, and she is dirt again. She finishes her journey at the Plastic Girl, the place still running flat-out at four in the morning. As she enters, the sounds of dirt life assault her, and she takes comfort. This is her world, and she knows all the warm places where she can hide.
She takes a room in the back and calls Cunningham. "Come and get your cube," she says, and then orders rum and lime.
By the time he arrives, she's rented an analyzer and some muscle. He comes in alone, a package in his hand. He closes the door behind him.
"Princess?" he asks.