Готовый перевод Нова Проспект / Nova Prospect: Ready Aim Fire (Адам)

Ready Aim Fire (Adam)

* * *

"Wake up, Neo... The Matrix has you."

The white ceiling of the sick bay. Adam closed his eyes until the download symbol stopped flashing.

++"All Systems Online."

Taking on the role of Morpheus, Pritchard sat beside him, leaning over a tablet. The cardiogram on the display showed a perfect sinus rhythm.

"What happened?" Pulsing images flashed before his eyes: Malik's vehicle hitting the concrete, the green glow... "Is Malik okay?"

"Jensen, you..." Pritchard looked at him with the most serious expression, " ... burned out on the job."

The joke was clearly rehearsed. Pritchard burst out laughing, barely uttering it. Adam pulled the cord from his wrist and rose from the bunk. Malik was all right, or Pritchard wouldn't be laughing so giddy.

Time synchronization with the central server is complete. It's been about four hours since the incident on the roof.

"The open mic is crying for you, Pritchard. I serious."

"You've been hit by a strong electromagnetic radiation. Something like an EM bomb," Pritchard didn't usually use vague terms, "Don't worry, I've fixed your settings - desensitized you to gravitational fluctuations. And Malik got off scot-free."

"And the source of that radiation was...?"

Pritchard got up from his chair and walked to the window, where the neon lights of evening Detroit were reflected in the light. The palette was jarring: neon pink, neon salmon, and faded neon red.

The head of the information security department and part-time amateur mechanic was the only one at Sharif Industries who allowed himself to wear long hair and wide pants. Before joining the company, Pritchard had been a black hat hacker, mostly involved in corporate sabotage. He was congenitally allergic to officialdom.

"She was."

Adam pulled a cigarette out of the pack and took a drag.

"Don't be in a hurry to relax - you'll be reporting to the chief as soon as you recover."

The last thing Adam wanted to do was report what had happened to the chief, but the luxury of choice and a corporate job were incompatible.

On the way to Sharif's office, the usually talkative Pritchard kept his eyes on his tablet, scrolling through an article on quantum teleportation.

"Teleportation? Really?"

"Well, she either teleported," Pritchard said thoughtfully, pressing the elevator button, "or she disintegrated. Which one makes more sense to you?"

Adam scrolled the footage from the roof in front of his eyes. Before the girl disappeared, she clamped her eyes shut and whispered something... What? Adam replayed the footage once more, but the girl's lips barely moved.

"One small fucking problem," Pritchard snapped him out of his musings. "Teleportation in this form is against known physical laws."

"Magic," Adam grinned unhappily.

"Tell that to Sharif, he'll shove a fireball up your ass."

Sharif's office took up the entire top floor. A robotic gardener, looking like a large mechanical crab, tended the plants in the reception area. A fusion of genetic engineering and chemical influences had made the shape of the shrubs perfectly round, and they were exactly the same.

When she saw Adam and Pritchard, Athena pressed a button, opening the armored door. The second attack on Sharif Industries had sent the chief into another bout of paranoia.

Sharif stood in front of the window with his hands behind his back, his mechanical hand gripping the wrist of his flesh arm tightly. Adam had never seen Sharif in the same suit, but any of them sat on him like a fitted suit.

"Good evening, gentlemen," Sharif turned around smoothly, flashing a white-toothed Mediterranean smile.

Adam had long suspected that business school graduates received those smiles with their diplomas. There was always something about Sharif's office that subtly irritated him, whether it was the black balloons hanging from the ceiling or the Rembrandt painting of Dr. Tulp's Anatomy Lesson that conjured up associations with a meat packing plant.

"Chief."

"Are you feeling better, Adam?" Sharif gave him exactly two seconds for an affirmative nod before turning on the projection on the full-room screen.

Security camera footage. Warsaw, July 18, 2027, 8:52 AM. The room in the video resembled a library - and judging by the way the employees of this institution ignored the visitors, they were in government service.

Corporations have taken almost everything from the states, but libraries have been mercifully left behind. A profitable library is as much an oxymoron as an incorruptible judge.

For about a minute nothing happened. When a familiar female figure appeared in the corner of the screen, Adam drummed his fingers on the marble surface of the desk. Less than two hours since the incident. Warsaw. Detroit.

The girl approached the counter and asked something with a naively friendly expression. Sharif zoomed in on the girl. Her trembling lips gave her away. She was clearly scared.

"Chief, no superjet..." Pritchard dropped his head on his hands and sighed heavily.

"The existing technologies do not allow to reach Warsaw at such time."

Sharif never interrupted. He could gently suggest that his statement was by default more important than his interlocutor's.

"What did she ask?" Adam asked, seeing that the uncertainty on the girl's face had been replaced by confusion.

Sharif shrugged.

"Something that landed her in a mental hospital less than half an hour later."

"A victim of experimentation?" Pritchard suggested. "Lost her marbles?"

Adam shook his head. She didn't look insane. Besides, if she'd escaped from the lab where the world-altering technology had been invented, they'd have an army after her.

"No one but us is looking for her?"

"That's a great question, Adam. No one. Dead silence across the channels - and yet her face was on every news station in the world."

Adam quickly flipped through the news headlines. A faceless "wanted" among hundreds of others just like it.

"A good-for-nothing girl who can teleport thousands of miles away. For now, we have a head start."

The hen that lays the golden eggs. The familiar expression of mild obsession appeared on Sharif's face.

//You owe that man your life," Adam reminded himself. - You owe him your life.

"Get her here, Adam," Sharif addressed him, placing a cybernetic hand on his shoulder, causing the warm gesture to become somewhat mechanical, "without making too much noise."

"We have no idea what we're dealing with!" Pritchard's objection fell into the void.

"For now. But if there's something in this girl that allows her to teleport, we'll find what it is."

We'll find it, patent it, reproduce it, make a profit, and rise to the top of the Dow Jones. Adam glanced at the Rembrandt painting, at the sharp scalpels thrust over the pale, immobile body.

"No one's gonna hurt her, Adam."

Of course not. Sharif replaced his torn limbs with implants for his own good.

"I don't doubt it, Chief. I'm not gonna let that happen."

The threat in his voice is veiled so carefully that no social module could recognize it.

* * *

"Another three hours and we're in Warsaw!"

There was always an unhealthy enthusiasm in Farida's voice when she was excited. Something told Adam that her excitement had nothing to do with the fact she was at the controls of an unfamiliar high-speed jet.

"We won't be there for more than two hours, Malik," Adam cooled her enthusiasm.

Over the Atlantic Ocean, it was shaking like a roller coaster. Adam gripped the seat rail.

++"Patient_Zero files received."

An incoming message is transmitted over an encrypted channel. A video file and a couple of pictures.

A man with a thin and sad face appeared in the video. He was clearly unaccustomed to speaking on camera and was fidgeting unsteadily in his chair.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Jensen," the man paused as if Adam could answer him. "Dr. Agnus Bambi, head of the psychiatry department. Mr. Sharif has asked me to give you the preliminary diagnostic results.

The video showed a girl lying unconscious on a long white couch. Metal wires stretched from her temples and wrists. She was almost naked except for the white strips of cloth on her breasts and thighs. Adam highly doubted the ethics of such a recording. It was naive, however, to think that there was anything even remotely resembling medical ethics in Sharif and Bambi's arrangement.

The medical room looked typical of a former communist bloc - the walls were of cheap wood paneling that was a poor imitation of some other paneling that probably mimicked the forgotten original.

"The patient was in hallucinatory delusional agitation at the time of admission. The initial analysis of the brain examination did not show a typical clinical picture for a schizophrenic-type disorder."

Looking closely at the girl, Adam found an explanation for the sense of alienness she evoked - the unusual cut of her eyes.

"White female in her 20s. Numerous scars on her body and a history of several old compound fractures. On the cheek is a scar from a chopped wound inflicted with great force by an unknown sharp object with a curved point."

A victim of violence? The girl looked defenseless and lost in this artificial dream, a prisoner of deep anesthesia.

"No traces of dental work on the teeth. A rose tattoo on the inner thigh, almost at the groin. No history of childbirth or abortion."

The girl had an innocent, childlike expression on her face, the only thing spoiling the impression was the scar on her cheek. Baby-face, the eternal girl. One of the most popularized types of beauty.

"No immunizations. Growing up in cramped conditions, with little food and nutrition. Most likely far from civilization and proper medical care."

The details of the puzzle were beginning to take shape in Adam's head, but he didn't like the way the final picture looked.

"A preliminary DNA analysis will be ready for your arrival, Mr. Jensen."

It shook. Malik swore. Adam remembered to download Polish. The language programs were far from perfect, and often relegated to machine translation, but he would have to say something to the girl when she woke up from the tranquilizers, albeit in a broken language.

Adam turned off the projection module. He closed his eyes. When this was all over, he would tip back a glass of good fifty-year-old Dalmore.

When Adam woke up, the panorama of Warsaw with its domes of Mary Magdalene Cathedral Church shrouded in a strange haze was already spreading outside the window.

* * *

"Welcome to Warsaw, Mr. Jensen. All good?"

The language module failed him already on the first question. Adam nodded.

The marble floor of the research center had long since lost its luster, covered with rough potholes from the feet of countless visitors. The psychiatry department was on the twenty-second floor.

"We got the preliminary DNA tests."

The dramatic pause after the sentence did not bode well.

"You'd better take a look."

But before the professor could project the DNA hologram on his desk, a deafening siren shook the building. Like a bad movie, Adam had an eerie sense of déjà vu. He'd been subconsciously expecting something like this.

"It's probably a drill...."

"Where is she?" Adam interrupted him. He didn't doubt the siren was connected to the girl.

"Ward six. Right down the hall. Mr. Jensen, if this isn't a drill, the police will be here.."

He doesn't want any unnecessary fuss. Adam has to get out of the building before the police get to him.

A fucking drill. There was a pool of blood on the white floor, the lower half of the halved woman still sitting on the chair. Welcome to psychiatry!

The door to ward six is open.

"Zirael," Adam heard a low male voice. Jensen thought it sounded like he was speaking French.

He didn't like the exoskeleton-clad man leaning over the girl at first sight. Adam pointed his gun at him and remembered that he didn't have a license to kill in Poland. Okay, he'd give the bastard one single warning to put down

Another sword?!

Sword and pointy ears. Pointy fucking ears! Fucking elf! The level of insanity in Adam's life had hit a ceiling. It is so lucky that psychiatry was just a stone's throw away.

Elf, dwarf, goblin - everyone understands the language of metal. The bullet flew out of the Zenith's barrel, aimed right between the elf's eyes.

The energy shield deflected it. Not bad technology for a medieval race. It's crap.

The girl screamed, trying in vain to break free of the medical wires holding her down.

The elf struck the sword flat. Metal clattered against metal, the blow so strong it sent sparks flying. Blocking the lunge with his hand, Adam drove his fist into his opponent's nose. The shield, thin as if it were made of ice, sagged, but withstood the blow. The adrenaline in Adam's blood was rising rapidly and uncontrollably. His betaphenethylamine excitement level was off the charts.

With a second swing of his sword, the elf aimed for his torso. Adam barely dodged, but the razor-sharp blade left a long cut in his leather cloak. If bullets and fists couldn't penetrate the shield, it was time for heavy artillery.

Adam caught the sounds of quick runs and sharp, jagged commands. It was less than five minutes from the siren to the arrival of the rapid response team.

++"Typhoon explosive system ready for use." Limit the kill radius to ninety degrees.

Fire!

The shockwave shrapnel pierced the ice shield, shattering the steel of his armor. The elf fell to the ground, blood streaming down his pale face. He cursed in an unknown tongue...

And disappeared.

"Behind!"

If it hadn't been for that scream, the sword thrust would have pierced him through. Adam turned sharply and reloaded the Typhoon. One more wave and the elf would be off to his magical land.

There was a deafening pop in his ears. There was a black hole in the air next to Adam. And another two meters away, near the exit. Then another. In their darkness, human - or non-human - shapes were already discernible. The elf called for reinforcements.

"Don't move, SWAT!"

Adam would have given a lot to see the fight that would unfold here any minute now, but time was running out.

It took him about a second to send a high-voltage discharge through the medical robot. Another grabbed the girl around the waist and slammed his fist into the windowpane, shattering it. A shot. Another. Adam didn't turn around.

++"The Icarus system is ready for use."

Twenty-second floor. When she saw the emptiness beneath them, the girl struggled, trying in vain to slip out of his grasp.

"No-o-o-o!

Before Adam could warn her that everything was all right, a block of ice struck his back, pushing them into the abyss. A abyss of sixty very long and very short meters.

"Caranthir, neen!"

The translation program froze.

Adam was tumbling rapidly downward along with shards of glass and chunks of ice block. Ashy hair whipped across his face, the girl's fingernails digging into his side.

"Idio-o-o-o..." a desperate scream in his ear.

The panorama of Warsaw - cathedral domes, neon signs, skyscrapers - flashed before his eyes. White. Blue. Red. Green. Green?!

"Easy, ea..." with the corner of his eye he could already see the familiar glow.

Shit, not this!

++"Unstable gravity. Icarus system deactivated."

You patch it up, Pritchard! What the hell is her name?

"Zirael, cal..."

++"Collision with the ground in ten meters."

The name only made her twitch more.

There was no way to knock her out in flight - too little time. Adam tried desperately to restart Icarus

"Collision with the ground in five meters."

Fuck. Fuck!

++"A collision with the ground..."

* * *

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Переведено на Нотабеноиде
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Переводчики: Camrad_RIP