Готовый перевод Нова Проспект / Nova Prospect: Flagcarrier (Адам)

Flagcarrier (Adam)

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++"Attention! The Health Guard system is critically damaged. The Typhoon system is critically damaged. System..."

A lousy news summary. The last time he'd experienced a similar sensation was right after surgery when the swelling of his brain had made the messages flash before his eyes in red jerky lines.

"Extremely stress-resistant psyche" if the dossier compiled by Sharif Industries' security service was to be believed. Adam had the feeling that the world had set out to test that characteristic against him. Durand's betrayal. Dismissal. with blacklisting. That July morning when he'd first laid eyes on what he'd once called his hands.

Everything that happened in his life before he met the girl on the roof can be summarized by the short phrase "shit happens". Shit happens to everybody. The events afterward were a potent mix of fantasy and mysticism. Both genres Adam couldn't stand.

He poured some of the shit they sell in Shanghai under the label "whiskey" into his glass. Globalization, for fuck's sake, and the local stuff was just window cleaner. It burned his throat pleasantly but didn't help the nasty aftertaste.

What was the green weightlessness that Ciri had dragged him through? In the hand of the "elf" - Adam already hated that word - a block of ice appeared out of nowhere. Where had he gotten the matter and energy to form it? How did he control it?

Immersed in his musings, Adam tried in parallel to contact Pritchard via the terrible glitchy Infolink.

Recommendation from the chancellor of the University of Phoenix. Top of his class. Adam knew how the world worked and what laws it obeyed. There's no magic in the world. Just physics. Mechanics. Thermodynamics. Electrodynamics. Quantum... The devil with it, quantum physics cannot be fully understood by any mentally healthy person.

There must also be laws describing this so-called magic. The theory of portals and the function of fireballs. All of existence can be reduced to one equation. What did Bumby have to say about Ciri's DNA? He's got, uh.

"Don't you wash yourselves with soap?" A girl's voice rang out.

Adam smiled involuntarily - someone had more pressing problems than his own. He had already risen from his chair to help but thought better of it in time. //"I hope she doesn't ask me to show her how to use the shower," Adam grinned, "I'm on duty.

++"A secure connection to nucl3arsnake will be established within a minute".

The first good news of the day.

Adam clicked the TV remote. Instead of the Warsaw hospital, the screen showed a blonde woman with unnaturally long legs, calling out loudly to the Almighty. Monstrous proportions. The implants ushered in a new, very surreal era in pornography. The Picasso era.

Somebody got to channel forty-six and decided to stop. A commendable eagerness to learn about the local culture.

Elise Kassan, with her unchanging plastic smile, lied that there was no news.

Adam puffed on a crappy Chinese cigarette, hoping the filters would let the nicotine through. Hell no. Glitching is just what Adam needs more of right now.

"Alive?" Pritchard's voice was as ironic as ever.

Adam never thought he'd be glad to hear him. Pritchard remained the last bastion of sanity in this crazy world.

"Dead," Adam replied phlegmatically.

"As is your sense of humor, Jensen. A girl?"

There were splashes coming from the bathroom.

"She is washing," Adam answered briefly and then got to the point: "We're in Shanghai. We need to get out of here."

The silence lingered for a couple seconds.

"Shanghai?! Why not at Tai Yun's Headquarters?" Pritchard's voice had that familiar sarcasm in it. "It would have saved me a headache, and them too."

Tai Yun Medical. The information about the Warsaw Incident must have reached their ubiquitous ears. Adam put out his cigarette and immediately lit a second one.

"I didn't ask for this."

Pritchard sighed expressively.

"Why doesn't Vanderwoman teleport you to Detroit? Out of mana?"

The mana argument is no more absurd than the others.

"She's exhausted. We have to find another way out of China. And I need a pilot."

"Did I ask you for a Wishlist?" There was something nervous in Pritchard's laughter. "Jensen, this place is going to hell. The elves... the fucking elves!.. are being dismantled for parts by Tai Yun. Your Supergirl is next."

When he was a student, Adam had a girlfriend who liked to watch B-movies, masterpieces like "Abraham Lincoln vs. the Zombies" and "Godzilla vs. Terminator". Now he's got a starring role in one of those movies. Cyborgs vs. Elves.

"All right. I'll give you a pilot."

Ciri came out of the bathroom, wiping her ashy hair with a towel. Despite her skinny appearance, her legs were clearly muscular, and she was no stranger to sports. //"What the hell is a sport in the Middle Ages," Adam faltered. - A swordswoman. A swordswoman and a mage. Multiclass."

He'd miscalculated the length of the shorts - it had been a long time since he'd bought a woman clothes. Adam averted his eyes before the girl could see him. The lenses, however, masked the direction of his gaze.

Ciri coughed, and he continued the conversation on the balcony. The sky over Shanghai was a dusky gray. It was getting harder to breathe in the evening, and passersby kept their filter masks on.

++"Critically poor air quality. Filters are st...". The message was interrupted, and the vision module turned red for a moment. The elite of Hensha Island could afford large-scale air purifiers. Their filth was settling on the continent.

"Stay down until we figure out a way to get you out."

Lay low. Adam glanced at the barely visible cameras mounted just inside the entrance to the apartment. Not a good plan. More than anything, he hated inaction.

"Wait for the signal."

"Connection to nucl3arsnake established." Adam was left alone with a view of southern Shanghai, an industrial zone where cubic factory buildings dominated the residential areas. An enormous anthill in which everything moved so fast that it seemed as if someone had put what was happening on fast-forward. And only in the distance could be seen the huge towers of corporations, glowing in the twilight like neon supernovae.

The air, filled with particles of factory dirt tickled his nostrils compulsively. In the distance, a hologram of the lead singer of the Atomic Kittens could be seen twitching to the beat of inaudible music. Adam wondered for a moment what this picture looked like to a girl from the Middle Ages. St. Witt dancing in the middle of Doomsday.

He heard a quiet voice calling to him. Ciri was leaning over the monitor with a glass of whiskey. If she wanted to try the local liquor, she should start with something other than this booze. //"Is she even twenty-one?" - The vigilant cop in Adam woke up.

The plastic frame of the glasses slid down to the tip of the graceful nose. One of the few Steiner-Bisley designs for civilians. The first thing that came to Adam's mind. Sharif Industries employed a blinded engineer who used Steiner-Bisley to magnify and decipher text. He flatly refused to be modified, even at the company's expense.

The luxury of choice.

Adam was already imagining how he would explain the computer's construction, but Ciri pointed to the flickering lines. A plain text file.

TAI YUN MEDICAL WILL BE HERE IN HALF AN HOUR.

RUN

WINTERMUTE

What the...?

The concentration of adrenaline in the bloodstream rose sharply. The last line of the message read:

方浜中路 221 Mr. Tuesday. P: AP; Rev9:3

Address. The godforsaken slums of Shanghai. The police don't go there. No one who cares about life goes there.

Ciri looked at him worriedly as he scanned the system. Adam automatically assured her that everything was fine. The protocol for communicating with civilians was embedded in the subcortex of his mind. The girl grew even more agitated.

Suspiciously high outgoing traffic. A large number of packets from the same address. The computer was hacked. Point and purposeful - less than ten minutes after he'd contacted Pritchard and less than an hour after he'd purchased the device. Adam tried to determine where the attack was coming from but quickly discarded the idea after assessing the level of work involved.

Trying to distract? Scare him?

Half an hour. Adam looked out onto the street - there were far fewer people on the street than there were a couple of minutes ago. Of the list of shitty signs, this one was in the top ten.

Trying to help? Who the hell is Wintermute? Adam knew Pritchard's nicknames by heart. He'd never heard of Wintermute.

"Ciri, we have to go."

Ciri was already settled on the couch, slamming open a second bag of chips with a pop. She would need to be fed something protein-containing.

"What? Already?" There was fear in those big green eyes. "Give me something. At least a knife."

Adam hesitated at the idea and shook his head.

"I doubt that you..."

"I know how to use it. I'll show you."

Giving a gun would be suicide - a folding knife would suffice. Ciri squeezed the hilt and looked at it appraisingly. A serrated blade three inches long, high carbon steel. It wasn't likely to tell her anything.

She bounced away before she attacked, a quick, fancy style - in Adam's opinion, too flashy. She spins like a circus performer but moves lightning-fast. He easily blocked her lunge. Ciri jerked her arm away, afraid for a second that she'd hurt herself. Not bad for a girl. He wonders where she'd learned to do that.

"You can," he agreed.

Something smug flashed in her smile.

He needs to assess the situation.

Adam looked out into the barely lit hallway. The dirt stains on the floor were visible, left by the shoes of a thousand dubious tenants. The infrared scan showed two figures on the main staircase and one on the alternate staircase. And many more at the bottom. It agreed with the unknown hacker's prediction that Tai Yun was preparing to infiltrate in about fifteen minutes. This hiccup was extremely to his advantage.

Adam methodically calculated his options. From the long list of exceptionally lousy ones, the best was to try to slip out of the building unnoticed through the emergency stairwell and hide in the slums.

"Can you run?"

Adam had no doubts about his quickness.

"Yes, I can," Ciri replied quietly. The confidence in her voice was critically lacking.

Adam looked closely at the girl and felt a prick of conscience. The dark circles under her eyes. Her shoulders slumped - she was exhausted. Ciri sighed, feeling the stare:

"...but not too fast."

//"Not too fast" is a quick and reliable way to get to know Chinese monopolists better.

"I'll pick you up if you need me."

She nodded, nervously biting her chapped lip.

Adam couldn't afford the noise of a gunshot. The blade extended from his hand with a mechanical clang. Ciri flinched, but didn't make a sound. Good. There was no need to fear the girl's screams.

As soon as half the modules stopped working, Adam felt naked. He hadn't even noticed how he'd bonded himself to them with strong neural connections. Even sooner than Sharif had predicted.

Adam crept silently toward the door leading to the emergency stairwell. The element of surprise, coupled with inhuman reflexes, meant that the mercenary didn't have time to pull the trigger of his automatic shotgun. The blade whistled through the air. As if in slow motion, Adam saw his pupils dilate and his mouth slowly open.

A direct stab to the heart. The monomolecular blade left a thin, almost surgical, cut in the armor. Death was instantaneous.

The mercenary collapsed like a helpless puppet, slowly slipping off the blade. Adam gently held the falling body. He didn't touch civilians - as much as possible - but he killed those who would have killed him. Moral torment was reserved for off-duty time - a luxury Adam didn't have.

Judging by Ciri's reaction, this wasn't the first murder she'd witnessed.

Adam caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. An automatic bot. From Steiner-Bisley with love.

"Ciri, down!"

The girl deftly, with an almost acrobatic pirouette, bounced to the side. The machine gun shot flew a few inches away from Adam.

Ciri leaped at the drone, the knife scraping across the metal with a nasty squeak. What the hell is she doing?! The girl was thrown back against the wall by the shockwave. Apparently, the program dictated that she be kept alive. The girl knows how to use a knife, but her common sense is clearly impaired.

He doesn't have the time or firepower to destroy the bot. Two aimed shots bought him a couple of seconds - enough to pick up Ciri and throw her over his shoulder. Adam didn't feel the slightest bit heavy, but the system estimated the burden at one hundred and twenty pounds.

In a couple of seconds, he was already on a dark street, almost knocking down an elderly Chinese man on the way. A topographical map of the area stood before his eyes. Dead ends. Back alleys.

Adam felt the girl's heart beating rapidly.

He'll try to escape through a 24-hour flea market. There should be no cameras in the last stronghold of the underground economy.

The elderly Chinese man's stream of swearing was interrupted by a wheeze. The old man had taken a stray bullet. In two leaps Adam disappeared into a dark alleyway leading to the great flea market of China.

He waded through the crowd, inevitably attracting even more attention. Somewhere behind him, there were shouts. Keep moving.

Stalls, stores, and grocery stores flashed before my eyes, with a surreal assortment of worn cybernetic prosthetics of outdated models, electrical junk, and stinking tofu. Every vendor felt obliged to call him a fucking laowai and a pile of augmented shit.

Ciri hung low on his shoulder, not making a sound. Adam dodged a bowl of tofu and swung over another stall. The endless labyrinth of Chinese capitalism led deeper and deeper into the slums.

Pritchard's brilliant plan to lay low in Shanghai has gone to hell.

Half an hour of frantic racing ended in a dubious alley. A small Asian man with an implanted jaw leaning against the wall immediately offered him some "black meat," the highly toxic kind of neuroposin fed to first-generation augs. Test versions of Tai Yun wich was dumped in a landfill.

Adam couldn't hear the howl of sirens, quick footsteps, or tearing orders, but he had no doubt they were running out of time. Tai Yun didn't need to make a fuss. Security cameras scan the city better than police trackers. There's nowhere for them to go. Their only advantage is the night.

And the thick veil of factory emissions that covered the city.

Ciri staggered back to the ground, brushed the sticking strands from her face, and looked at him with frank admiration:

"Are you wiedźmin?"

A wiedźmin? Judging by the reverence in her voice, it's something like a high wizard.

"I don't know who it is, but that's a word you'd rather forget, too."

The only thing on this street that looked more or less safe was an eatery called Grandpa Lao's. Someone had told him that the dirtier the food shop in China, the better the food.

Adam glanced at the girl's drained face and quickly scanned the establishment for cameras. He didn't want her to collapse from hunger and fainting at the worst possible moment.

"Ten minutes. No more than that." He nodded toward the diner, and Ciri brightened.

Grandpa Lao was deftly flipping noodles with his augmented hands. Judging by the crowd, black meat is the hit of the season. Not a good place to take a girl out for dinner.

"Humans can't run that fast," Ciri continued, hypnotizing either the noodles cooking or the movements of the strange hands. "And fight. You're a mutant, aren't you?"

Three yuan. Adam gave ten, and the old man almost wept. The colossi of Tai Yun Medical and Fuji Electric stood on the bones of men like him.

On the primitive, still plasma TV, Eliza was still rapturously talking about the newborn panda

"I'm..." began Adam, wondering how best to explain to Ciri who he was.

The girl, however, lost all interest in the conversation as soon as a plate of noodles appeared in front of her. The chopsticks were a dead end, and the old man found what appeared to be the only plastic fork in the diner, yellowed with soy sauce.

"... a human," Adam continued.

"Who else?"

Ciri ate greedily, like a ravenous animal. She sneezed, wiping her watery eyes with the back of her hand. Her glasses were fogged up. Lao gave her a thumbs-up. "Haochi, hunyang, haochi!"

"Ooh, it's spicy, almost took my breath away!" Ciri slid the plate over. "Would you like some?"

He'd had enough Chinese crap for one twenty-four-hour period, but for Ciri, Adam ordered more. It disappeared at an enviable rate. Healthy appetite.

Wintermute's address pointed to an abandoned industrial building in the heart of the slums. Adam sent the coordinates to Pritchard.

What are his options? They had a head start of a couple of hours at worst, at best until dawn. Adam asked Pritchard if they could get them across the border that quickly. He responded by suggesting that Jensen's head implants had begun to corrode.

What does Wintermute need? A database search for the nickname turned up nothing.

Finishing her noodles, Ciri began to peck her nose at her plate. The adrenaline of the fight had quickly worn off. They would be able to spend the night somewhere in the slums. He'd let himself sleep for three hours, too. Adam wasn't sure how comfortable such accommodations would be, but better, than Tai Yun's lab anyway.

Ciri proudly refused to let him carry her and sluggishly followed him down the long, dark alleys.

The local culture was breathtaking. Cheap brothels with prosthetic whores. Brothels where the hikikomori rotted alive in five square feet connected to the only meaning of life, the Great Web. Time to rewrite the Bible. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was "cyberspace."

++"Reality is just a disease," Adam read the poster above the entrance to one of the establishments. And the more down-to-earth poison-pink lettering on the door read, "FUCKING UNJOY.

And it's all lavished with the smell of decaying flesh from black meat and soy sauce. What's it say? //"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."

"What does that guy want with you?" Adam asked, trying to distract the girl from the surroundings.

"Eredin?" She clarified before she continued nonchalantly, "He wants me to bear him a child."

Adam almost dropped his cigarette.

"For what?"

"He wants to make a baby with me," Ciri said, a little irritated, fixing her glasses that had slipped down the bridge of her nose.

Adam had been a police officer for years, but this was the first time he'd heard of such zealous rapists. Which stalking the victim through other worlds?

"Against your will?" That was an unnecessary clarification, Adam mentally chided himself, remembering the scene in the hospital.

Ciri laughed.

"How'd it look to you?"

This situation doesn't even seem weird to her. It's medieval. To Ciri, the ideas of feminism must be as exotic to her as magic is to him. Poor girl. Adam decided to enlighten her:

"In our world, a woman chooses who she has children with."

Ciri kicked the trash can, and green liquid spilled onto the asphalt. The junkie lying in the street didn't even bother to move away from the puddle.

"They're having a hard time here, damn."

Adam hummed. Ciiri appreciated the freedom of choice in the modern world. But, he glanced at the body lying in the street. Absolute freedom was no better than chaos.

Fuji Electric's biofluorescent lights were flashing neon green.

"Tell me about your magic," Ciri asked, pointing to the lanterns.

Adam didn't even know where to begin. Newton's laws?

++"Jensen. Checking the coordinates turned up nothing. Fucking bunker in the middle of nowhere. Be careful."

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