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

"Dead."
Cunningham nods. The cube is on the table before her. She holds out a hand. "Let's see what you've got," she says.
She checks three vials at random and the analyzer tells her it's chloramphenildorphin, purity 98 percent or better. She smiles. "Take your cube," she says, but he plugs it into the room's deck first, making sure it has what he wants. Then he puts it in his pocket and heads for the door.
"If you have another job," she says, "you know where to find me."
He pauses, a hand on the knob. His eyes, flicker. She receives an impression of sadness from him, as if he were mourning something newly dead.
He is an earthly extension, Sarah knows, of an Orbital bloc. She doesn't even know which one. He is a willing tool and an obedient one, and she has fed him her scorn on that account, but that doesn't disguise what they both know-that she would give all the contents of the packet, and everything else besides, if she could have his ticket, and on the same terms.
"I'll be on the ramp in an hour," he says. "Going back to orbit. "
She gives him a grin. "Maybe I'll be seeing you there," she says.
He nods, his eyes on hers. He starts to say something, then turns himself off again, as if he realizes it's pointless. "Be careful," he says, and leaves without another glance. One of her hired muscle looks in at her.
"It's clear," she says. The muscle nods.
She looks at the fortune in her hand and feels suddenly hollow. There is a vacuum in her chest where the joy should be. The drink she has ordered tastes as flat as barley water, and a headache throbs in time to the LED light burning in her forehead. She pays off her hired muscle and takes a cab to an all-night bank, where she deposits the endorphin in a rented box. Then she takes the cab home.
The apartment hums softly, emptily. She finds the control to her LED and turns it off, then throws her clothing in the trash. Naked, she steps into her room and sees the holo of Princess on her night table. Hesitantly, she reaches out to it, then turns it face down and falls into the welcoming blackness.

LOVELY AND WAITING FOR YOU
TERRY'S TOUGH N' TENDER
NOW

It is still night when she awakens to the sound of the door. "Daud?" she asks, and is answered by a groan.
He is wrapped in a sheet and covered with blood. Jackstraw holds him up, panting, his neck muscles straining. "Bastard," he says.
She picks Daud up like a child and carries him to her bed. His blood smears her arms, her breasts. "Bastard went thatch," Jackstraw says. "I was only gone a minute."
Sarah arranges Daud on the bed and unwraps the sheet. A whimpering sound forces its way up her throat. She puts her hand to her mouth. Daud is striped in blood-the thatch must have used some kind of weighted whip. Weakly, he tries to move, raises a hand as if to ward off a blow.
"Lie back," Sarah says. "You're at home."
Daud's face crinkles in pain. "Sarah," he says, and begins to cry.
Sarah feels tears stinging her own eyes and blinks them away. She looks up at Jackstraw. "Did you give him anything?" she asks.
"Yeah. Endorphin. First thing."
"How much?"
He looks at her blankly. "Lots. I don't know."
"You weren't supposed to leave the next room," she says.
His eyes slide away. "It was a busy night," he says. "I was only gone a minute."
She turns her eyes back to Daud. "It took more than a minute for this," she says. "Get the fuck out."
"It's not-"
There is a savage light in her eyes. She wants to tear him but she has other things to do. "Get the fuck out," she repeats. He hesitates for another instant, then turns away.
She cleans the cuts and disinfects them. Daud cries silently, his throat working. Sarah looks for his injector and finds it, loads it with endorphins from his cache, and guesses at a dosage. She puts it in his arm, and he says her name and goes to sleep. She watches for a while, making sure he hasn't taken too much, and then puts the covers over him and turns down the light. "Just lie back," she says. "I've got the price of your ticket." She leans down to kiss his beardless cheek. The bloody sheet goes in the trash.
Daud normally sleeps on the convertible sofa in the front room, and after making sure he is asleep, she moves to the other room and, without bothering to open the sofa, lies down on it. The room hums, and for a long while she listens.

TAMPA'S TOTALS OVERNITE, AS OF 8 THIS MORNING-TWELVE FOUND DEAD IN CITY LIMITS...LUCKY WINNERS COLLECT AT ODDS OF 5 TO 3

The explosion has enough force to throw the sofa against the far wall. Sarah feels a hot rush of wind that tears the breath from her throat, the elevator sensation of the world falling away, and then a final impact as the wall comes up. Screams are ricocheting from every corner, all the screams that Princess never uttered. There are fires licking like red laserlight.
She heaves herself to her feet and runs for the other room. She can see by the light of the burning bed. Daud is sprawled in a corner of the room, and parts of his body are open and other parts are on the walls. She is screaming for help, but alone she manages to get the burning bedding through the hole in the wall. Outside, the hot tongues of morning are rising in the east. She thinks she can hear Daud call her name.

BODY NEEDING WORK?
WE DELIVER

The ambulance driver wants payment in advance, and she opens her portfolio by comp and transfers the stock without questioning the prices he gives her. Daud dies three times before the driver's two assistants can get him out of the apartment, and each time they bring him back the prices go up. "You got the money, lady, and he'll be fine," the driver tells her. He looks at her nakedness with appreciative eyes. "All kinds of arrangements can be made," he says.
Later, Sarah sits in the hospital room and watches the doctors work and is told their rates of payment. She will have to make plans to convert the endorphin quickly, within a few days. Machines attached to Daud hiss and thump. The police surround her and want to know why someone would fire a shaped charge at her apartment wall from the building across the street. She tells them she has no idea. They have a lot of questions, but that seems to be the most frequent. Eventually she puts her head in her hands and shakes her head; and they shuffle for a while and then leave.
She wishes she had the inhaler: she needs the bite of hardfire to keep herself alert, to keep her mind functioning. Thoughts hammer at her. If Cunningham's people had been in her apartment, they would have known that she had slept in the back room, Daud in the front. They waited till the lights went down and she had the time to get to sleep, then fired with a weapon that would smash through the wall and scatter burning steel through the inside. They hadn't trusted that she wouldn't tell someone or that she wouldn't try to use the pieces of knowledge she had gained as leverage for some shifty little dirtscheme of her own.
Who would I tell?-she wonders.
She remembers Cunningham at that last moment in the Plastic Girl, the sadness in him. He had known. Tried, in his way, to warn her. Perhaps the decision had not been his; perhaps it had been made over his objection. What did the Orbitals care for one more dirtgirl when they had already killed millions, and kept the rest alive only so long as they were useful currency?
The Hetman glides into the room on catlike feet. He wears a gold earring, and his wise, liquid eyes are surrounded by the spiderwebs of the old hustler's dirtbound life. "I am sorry, mi hermana," he says. "I had no indication it would come to this. I want you to understand."
Sarah nods numbly. "I know, Michael."