starfish1: переводы

→“He was put into an extreme position, and he overreacted,” Duarte said. “Our place in humanity is special. The rules that apply to us are harsh. You and me and him. But there’s a reason for that, and I want you to know how much I honor his sacrifice. And yours. Both of yours.”

→“No. The one here. The station that controls the ring space. The first time anyone came though the ring, that same dead guy took me to the station. It was part of how the rings turned on. But I saw things there. Like a record of the old civilization? My friend, the dead guy, was looking through it for something, and because he was using me to do it, I saw it all too. Whatever made this? All of this? They were wiped out a long time before you and me got here. Billions of years, maybe. I saw whole systems going dark. I saw them trying to stop it by burning away entire solar systems. And it didn’t work. Whatever they tried to do, it failed, and they were all just wiped away with just their roads and their old machines left for us to stumble across. That thing that showed up on your ship? That’s them. The other them. That’s the thing that killed everything before Earth and Mars were part of the gate network.”

→“But why would it appear now?”

→It was easy to forget sometimes that the void cities hadn’t always been there. During the starving years, they’d been something like a dream. A promised land without the land. Homes for the Belt that could move through the gates to whatever system they chose. There had been a magic to them then. A sense of the unprecedented.

→The sad fact of the human species that High Consul Duarte understood so well was that you could never overcome tribalism and jingoism with an argument. Tribalism was an irrational position, and it was impossible to defeat an irrational position with a rational argument. And so, instead of presenting a logical plan for why humanity needed to give up the old national and cultural divides and become a single unified species, the high consul obeyed the old forms that everyone would understand, and went to war. Thankfully, a brief one.

→She turned to see him unleashing another kick, and managed to mostly sidestep it, letting it bounce off her hip and forcing him to stumble forward into her. She grabbed hold of his left arm and rotated through the hips to throw him face-first into a pressure-monitoring console a few feet away. He hit it with a thud and a crunch, and started to sag.

→Then, just because he’d kicked her in the ass, she snapped his left arm before she let him drop.

→Five minutes later, Katria and her five friends sat or lay on the floor, hands tied behind their backs. Amos had an eye that was already starting to swell shut, and four scrapes down his cheek that looked like he’d been clawed by a big cat. Bobbie had carefully avoided looking at her own face in anything reflective. But based on the volume of blood in her shirt, the wound on her face had to be pretty grotesque. There goes my not-needing-stitches plan. The pain in her backside also meant she wasn’t going to enjoy sitting for the next couple of months. That thought made her want to kick the unconscious man with the broken arm again. Or maybe Amos.

→“Katria,” Bobbie said, leaning down over the Voltaire Collective cell leader. “Is it okay if I call you Katria?”

→If Katria had any objections, she kept them to herself.

→To her surprise, Katria laughed. There was a brightness in her eyes that looked like fever. “We do indeed,” the woman said. It could have been a sparring partner’s salute or the threat of retribution. Bobbie really wished she could tell the difference.

→“Do we understand each other?”

→Bobbie grabbed the front of Katria’s shirt and picked her back up to her feet, then kept lifting until they were eye to eye.

→“Great. So, look. This could have gone better. We kicked your ass and you’re pissed now, I get that. If you want to be part of the revolution, great, we’d love to have you. But you run all your ops through Saba’s group. That’s nonnegotiable. Anything else, and we’re killing you and hiding your bodies in the fertilizer-recycling system.”

→--//--

→Bobbie had no idea what the word fragile meant when applied to Amos. She wasn’t sure she wanted to learn.

→“Be gentle,” Clarissa said. “He’s fragile right now.”

→“What? Hearing him go back to calling Holden ‘Cap’?” Bobbie said, ready to shrug it off. But something caught in her throat. “Yeah. I gotta admit it does. I might have a word with him on that.”

→“Still kinda chafes, don’t it?” Alex said, his voice gentle.

→“Oh, that thing. Be there in five,” she replied, and he shrugged and walked off without another word.