starfish1: переводы

→And as a new human order is struggling to be born in blood and fire, James Holden and the crew of the Rocinante must struggle to survive and get back to the only home they have left.

→Ships are disappearing without a trace. Private armies are being secretly formed. The sole remaining protomolecule sample is stolen. Terrorist attacks previously considered impossible bring the inner planets to their knees. The sins of the past are returning to exact a terrible price.

→He turned and saw something move. Something else , not another cloud like himself, like the others, like matter. Something solid but obscured by the emptiness of material like a shape in the fog. Many shapes, neither light nor dark, but some other thing, some third side of that coin, passing through the spaces between the spaces. Rushing toward them. Toward him.

→He couldn’t see the image on the screens to know if the stars were there. All he could sense were atoms and photons of the thing itself, not the pattern they made. Someone was screaming. Then someone else.

→I’m having a stroke , he thought. And then, No. Something else is wrong.

→“Approaching the ring, sir,” Keller said from the navigation controls. “Passing through in three. Two…”

→The woman nodded and walked off, her low g shuffle a little stiffer than the people around her. Amos rented a loading mech, grabbed the crate, and started for the Roci , Alex trotting along beside him.

→“Thanks, then.”

→“I don’t know either,” he said. “Back at Mars, you’d have been released to civilian life. But where we’re going, there is no civilian life. No human life at all. Do I turn you out to fend for yourself in the local food chain? Do I spend the time and resources it would take to send you back, and then back where? The forces that have taken control on Mars would see you as a traitor just the same as they would me. They’d throw you in the brig for life unless you cooperated with them. And if you were going to cooperate with them, then it wouldn’t make sense for me to send you back in the first place. Would it?”

→Butch scowled into the screen and blinked out to the blue arcology menu system. But the car started up.

→“Is there a problem?” Holden asked. “What are we talking about?”

→“I mean, we could make a burn for it,” Alex said, “but we got people coming from both directions and half as many crash couches as we’ve got folks.”

→Jim nodded, and then – to her surprise – it was easy. In her mind, the idea of unpacking her past to Jim – to anyone – was a thing of anger and disgust and recriminations. Or worse, of pity. Jim, who for all his faults was sometimes capable of perfection, listened carefully and completely. She had been Marco Inaros’ lover. She’d gotten pregnant young. She’d been involved – at first without knowing it – in the sabotage of inner planets ships. She had a son named Filip who had been taken from her as a way to control her. She described the dark thoughts, and realized it was very nearly the first time she’d talked about them openly, without a veil of ironic humor. I tried to kill myself, but it didn’t work. Just saying the words out loud felt like being in a dream. Or waking up from one.

→“Well,” she said. “When I was in my middle teens, I was living with a woman we called Tia Margolis and burning through the engineering courses on the networks as fast as I could, and there were ships that came through dock. Belter ships. Hard core.”

→“That’s a good idea,” Holden said. “Did you have someone in mind?”

→“Yeah, figured,” Amos said. “But here’s the thing. I was thinking about maybe taking on an apprentice. You know, help flesh out the crew. Get some skill redundancy.”

→“It wasn’t just for you,” Naomi said, making it a joke, and also not one.

→“So that immunity for the crew thing?”

→“Are you going to be able to help us?”

→Naomi blinked, seemed to lose focus for a moment, and shook her head. “He never said anything about that.”