Charles Stross - Escape

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 66.07KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

5: Escape

[ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]

Days passed. The Bronstein dropped towards Turing on a long, slow orbit. Its reaction tanks were more

than half empty: this was a one-way trip. The cold-burn fusion reactor guttered on, boiling nitrogen into

mist; condensers liquefied it, driving heat pumps, driving generators that powered the meson source that

kept it all running. No rain of charged particles scattered the darkness behind the ship. Clamped to its

docking end, layer upon layer of radiation-absorbent material fanned out in a dark sheath, refrigerated

down to cosmic background temperature. Trotsky watched, waited, holding course with nerveless

patience as the ship crept slowly up on its prey. At anything less than a hundred kilometres the Bronstein

was as good as invisible -- and by the time it closed to that range the attack would already be underway.

Unseen in the darkness, seventy eight other ships matched course and locked their star sensors to the

same beacons. The fleet ran under tight emission controls, desperate to maintain radio silence. A single

uncontrolled pulse could give them away. And if the attack failed, eight hundred million lives were

doomed.

The prey was vast, the size of a small moon. It was pitted and scarred, an egg-shaped thing with dimples

at each end. An intricate array of tiled segments panelled it, winding from one pole to the other, visible at

long range. They looked organic and self-similar, like something that had grown rather than been built.

Trotsky kept an array of sensors locked on the distant speck, watching for signs of activity, but none

came. Nothing but a steady output of heat, a cloudy motion at the edges of perception. The intruder

starship was passive, drifting, waiting or dead.

The Bronstein, in contrast, was a hive of activity. Warm bodies -- thirty of them crowded in a life-system

built for twelve -- squirted from the guts of the 'coder, coughing and choking on acrid air in the cramped

red spaces of the ship. Desperation packed them four to a cabin, anchored at wrist and shoulder by

restrainer straps, claustrophobia and tension vying for domination as they practised, and argued, and

practised again ... while down in the payload bay, the drones ran through their choreographed self-test

sequences ... and the 'coder interface waited in its geodesic container, for the signal to begin.

I'm dozing in the close warm darkness of a cabin and when somebody kicks my hand it gives me the

shock of my life. I open my eyes and jacknife awake against the sleeping straps all at once, and yell: "

shit!" -- even though it was only a light kick. Then I see who it is. "Raisa --"

"Yes." It's confused, everything's tumbling, and there's clothing in the air that makes it hard to tell what's

what, and it's dark. She holds on to me then tries to squirm around until she's face to face: it's difficult

getting oriented in free fall. "Oshi. I want to talk --"

"-- was asleep," I groan. Suddenly hear what she said. "Want to talk? What about?"

"What do you think?" she asks. She's holding me tight, nothing very intimate about it except the fact of

the contact in itself. I shiver, look, see how she's changed. She's only been out of the tank a day, and I

haven't seen much of her. Her new body is much like the last. Hair a fine dark stubble, skin tight and pale

and new, barely dry. The smell of her is the odour of the tanks, acrid grainy waft of synthetic chorionic

fluid. "You just came in."

"Ack." She leans back to see more of me. She looks pleased to see me, which is a realization that shakes

me. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's as if she's forgotten whatever happened last time we met:

or maybe wasn't even there at all. "Been up to much?"

"I'm exhausted. Messing with critpath analysers. Boris and Mik went toy-happy as soon as they woke

up; comes of having something to plot. They're both the same: no respect for humanity. Want me to staff

for them. How about you?"

"You mean they've been up for days?" She looks annoyed. "I was meant to be first out --"

The smell, the touch, of her: I bend forward, snap out of the sleep restraint. "Yes," I say; "but the plans

changed. " She lets go of me. "They figured it's more important to know who you need first, before they

pull them through. So, load one meat chassis before another. What does it mean to them? I'm here,

you're here. And I'm tired, while you want to talk. Is there no justice in Hell?"

She laughs, a little brittle, holding her distance now. "Do you ever think of anything else? Sex or

violence?" Reaches out and pinches my arm in a way which sends a thrill through me. "What are you

thinking?"

"I was born to go fast and explode," I say. Remembering: dropping through layers of atmosphere,

chutes banging open overhead. Yes, I go fast and explode. I look over her shoulder. The cabin door

has closed automatically, conserving airflow. "You're cold."

"Huh." She leans closer, hanging on my shoulders and hips by fingertips and agile toes. Microgravity drifts

us both backward into the net of sleep webbing. "I'm here now. Aah, shit." She looks away, troubled.

That black coif of thick hair is missing; she purses her lips, holds her breath in for a moment. I freeze,

trying to memorize the shape and presence of her, trying to make myself a camera. Trying to understand

that initial flash of fascination, back on the colony, why something like it is still there despite the

intervening nightmare. "I've been doing some thinking. There's a long way to go, I admit. I'm not sure

what I want. When you arrived I was on a backswing from something messy. But I like you. I'm just not

sure --"

"Why the revelation?" I ask, heart pounding.

She hesitates a moment before replying: "Don't try to push me, Oshi. There's a lot you don't know."

I stare. "That goes without saying," I say. I feel very cold: "were you in the colony medicentre? Do you

know what happened there after the radiation storm?"

She looks startled. "No --" Stop. "Was it bad?"

"You can have no idea," I say.

"Never mind then," she adds. "It's over. Just give me some time and come visit me. I just wanted to say

that." She half-smiles, then leans closer and hugs me. "Okay?"

"Yes. What happened to --"

She looks at me oddly. "You happened, that's what."

I feign incomprehension to cover my real confusion. "I happened? I don't understand."

"You wouldn't," she says. A little tightly, "There was no room in the Duat. Everyone knew everyone else,

and we all had our skeletons to bury from the time ... before then. Coming on so direct was, a bit,

unexpected. I won't say unwelcome. But I've had to do lots of thinking."

"What happened?" I ask. I hold out my arms.

"What happened --" she bites her lower lip. Looks at me, with a speculative expression I've seen before

that shocks me with its directness. She takes my fingertips and lets me pull her closer, until I can feel her

breath on my face.

"You know about the goon squad?" she asks.

"The goons? Didn't Anubis make them out of --"

A finger stills my lips. "She's dead, now," says Raisa. She doesn't sound desolate: she's managed to reach

the stage of looking back on it from that level of equanimity that lets us keep our sanity in return for a

certain coldness in the soul. "Anubis took her, along with the other over security specialists. All except

Mikhail, in fact, turned into ... weapons. I heard this later. I never saw Amina again, not as anyone I

could recognize. You die a little when that happens. We'd been together years before the evacuation,

thought we'd be together afterwards, one way or the other ... wrong. That was the big mistake I regret:

assuming there'd be time to say goodbye. It was years ago, when I first arrived, and there were other

people in mourning. That's why we never did anything about the goons before. But you wouldn't know

anything about that, would you?"

"Wrong," I manage. "I think --" I look her in the eye, remembering the scene in the lobby of Anubis's last

retreat, and suddenly I can't think of Ivan any more. "I may have been there too. Once. The worst is

knowing that you'll never know what happened, isn't it? What they -- what Anubis -- did. Death is the

ultimate unfinished story, isn't it?"

"'Death is the ultimate unfinished story'; I like that." She strokes my hair absently. "That's what made you

so abrupt?"

"There are no second chances."

She sighs. "Maybe not." Then she looks me in the eye and I see something there, some stoicism that I

hadn't recognized before: she's tougher than I am, I think, able to live with the consequences of her

mistakes in a way that I'm still vacilating about. "What do I mean to you, Oshi? You don't know me, I

don't know you. What is it?"

"You're very attractive," I say, automatically and truthfully. "And also --"

"Thank you, but I'd rather leave that unfinished," she said, smiling faintly. "You get defensive when you're

not in control of the situation, don't you?"

"What situation?" I demand.

She leans closer and I can feel her heartbeat, her proximity. I'm really tired, I ache with it, but I can't let

go now. She's too important. "This," she says, lightly touching my forehead. "If you'd ever put down roots

in a world, then had them lopped off, you'd know what real loss was about."

"But I have --"

"Roots?" she's so skeptical it runs through me like a knife. "You've never been loved, Oshi, that's what it

looks like. Don't tell me more. You said yourself; your background, your childhood, everything. You

think you can love, and you're probably right, but whoever is first to fall in love with you ..." her

expression softens ... "be gentle with them."

"I will," I promise.

"I mean it," she says. Half-smiling again: "it might be me, if you work at it. And if you give me enough

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Charles Stross - Escape.pdf

共22页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Charles Stross - Escape

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: