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Corporation 36
I haven't been here for a long time. Probably as long ago as he became a slinker again. Or a persecutor, if you use corporate newspeak. Whatever you call it, a person of my profession is in no hurry to return to the places of former glory, because he firmly knows that only black shadows of the past are waiting for him there, from which there is a lot of pain and a little or even less money.A good client is a new client. A good place is one where no one knows you.Simple job - came, sniffed, left. But sometimes there are such circumstances that like it or not, you agree.Return. Breathe in the rancid air of the Megapolis again. Again raise your face to the sky and be surprised at what you see. You don't really see.Memory is a traitorous thing. How many revolutions have passed since you stood in this very place, looking at the silent four from under your brows. Romulus, Ulysses, Urban and Cora. Creatures whom the language did not dare to call people. On that day, they also returned to
Corporation 37
The towers were designed taking into account centuries of operation, under the standard size of the bot, which, in turn, repeated the human dimensions in that frequent case when even the most intelligent technology began to give in to beyond design anomalies. Simply put, the towers were built so that a Slinker like me could get into every corner of them. The question was only in sufficient skill and the presence of an exoskeleton.Under the strained buzz of the actuators, I methodically fingered with power gloves along the brackets of the fasteners inside the technical well in the very thickness of one of the towers of the two-headed complex. The scanners on the back of the neck successfully translated the structure of communications around me into the visual channel, successfully supplementing the scheme previously received through their persecutor channels with relevant information.The Guild, in addition to actually servicing orders, has long served as a kind of exchange of gray, a
Corporation 38
The choice of car was a mistake.A heavy but well-traveled Toyota can come in handy at long distances, but here, in the labyrinth of an abandoned place in the middle of century-old industrial zones, agility and secrecy were more important. If only they could guess how far this flight would take them.A short look behind.The client continued, biting her lips, scratching her knuckles with her nails, tearing them literally into blood. At the same time, her face remained stony and pale to blue. Not a good sign, not a good one at all.She was ordered to be taken away from the safe house on the lower tiers of the residential Bauhaus near the very borders of the Megapolis. It’s not unusual how many times it was necessary to rescue endangered witnesses and fugitive agents into remote refugio like this, almost always they twitched, cried, rejoiced, joked nervously, but just did not remain silent.And the rescued in the bulk did not give the impression of a puppet, pushed under the hands of an
Corporation 39
Patience. Even if he didn't have the patience. The defendant is armed to the teeth, the augmentation is heated to the fullest, but everything that he now sees around him does not give rise to the slightest degree of suspicion in him, only notes of displeasure that they make him wait. Well, really, there are no traces of external surveillance or parasitic traffic around, she - and what is she, no serious augmentation, the lowest link in the corporate food chain, just a person who had the luck to cut down the dough in an easy way. To expect some kind of trick from her is how paranoid you have to be.And here is her colleague.Mekk appeared in the door noiselessly, like a shadow, but the defendant, on her orders, heard, as it were, real steps along the corridor, a real squeak of a castle, a real breath noise. This is a very simple trick if you live in a crystal world. The ringing of razor-sharp edges sounded like music in her ears.What happened?They got there before me.Who? "Seiko"? P
Corporation 40
Portholes on the "Atreyu" was not provided at all. On the one hand, what are you going to look overboard, the plutoids beyond the orbit of Sedna here, at a distance of fifty ticks from Sol, gave a maximum of the third magnitude, and in order to see them with the naked eye against the backdrop of starlight, you would first have to sit locked up for half an hour with the attendant turned off lighting. On the other hand, the regular fifteen revolutions per hour would give such a fierce attack of vertigo when looking outside that an idle navigator who decided to stare outward would quickly get sick of green elephants.And who needs these windows. Cylindrical cabin "Atreyu", according to the creators' plan, was equipped in a circle with virtreals of the highest detail, which, without unnecessary urges to visit the latrine out of turn, provided the navigator with both an excellent overview and augmented reality, and did not blind the eyes of Sol's annoying lantern, which, although it looked
Corporation 41
Snorting under his breath, Stegenga made sure that the eclipse recording was securely copied to the onboard infoguard's personal repository for further packet transmission to Matushka, and only then did he hear some screams behind the bulkhead. It seems that it was Van der Boer yelling, while in the second voice, probably, Toptun howled this unpretentious aria, who else would be there.Here are the restless ones.Having hastily handed over the watch to the "iron woodcutter", Stegenga jumped off the duty navigator's lodgement and rushed to the membrane of the main hatch with wide jumps - to separate.The fight was already in full swing. Van der Boer, a short stature, jumped around Toptun, towering over him like a stone cliff, while both of them yelled in chorus "you have no right" and "I order you." All this was very exciting and even carried some traces of meaningfulness - judging by the aiming of his jumps, Van der Boer had as his goal to grab something from Toptun's hands, which he
Corporation 42
It snowed for the second ten sols.If on a godforsaken planetoid that does not even have the rudiments of an atmosphere, there can be normal precipitation in general. The five-hundred-yard blades of a scoop at the bottom of the Echo Quarry, fifty miles to the northeast, did not slow down around the clock, raising clouds of icy dust to the zenith, which glittered like a crown ring in the sunlight at dawn, spreading around the area in a white shroud and finally settling at under your feet.Wilkes cleared his throat automatically. To old men like him, the white powder on the reinforced boots was like a different story, not quite as colorful and not quite as festive looking.Three nuclear bombs laid by the Tanno brothers in old workings near the Ruben Grottoes. Idiots did not listen to exhortations. Our land and the whole story.The land mines gasped so that they brought to the surface from one and a half megatons of stone chips, so inopportunely fused into the ice just at the very epicen
Corporation 43
Here is the character. It's always been that way for as long as Wilkes can remember it. When a cryoclastic flow almost flattened Fusco in 1965, Jen had to be dragged out of the cab of the excavator by almost force. Her eyes are drowsy, her head dangles like a doll's, her hands are shaking from fatigue, but all the same. Every time I sent her to eat and sleep in the dome, I had to persuade her. Not a man, flint.Wilkes obediently slowed down, watching the beacon approach. Look, hurry up.Through the halo of snow, one could barely make out how a gray shadow galloped over the crests of faults, throwing fountains of snow drifts with its drive wheels.“Be careful, Jen, where you fly like that, you will kill yourself.”The rover skidded the last hundred yards, spraying Wilks' shell with a stream of flowing ice sand so that the visor had to be wiped down.But go and she herself, you can’t see her face, of course, but in terms of the plasticity of movements - you can’t confuse it with anyone.