Kee: переводы

→“All right,” Tanaka said to Teresa, playing for time. “Please come with me. Do it now, and in return I won’t kill your friends.”

→_What the fuck was that?_

→She floats up faster than bubbles, the heat below and behind, the cold cracked open to the stars, and screaming, she launches up and out of the dream and into the body that is only hers, in a confusion of vomit and weep and a fading deeper than dreams could be.

→The kick from behind blows through, carrying blood and bone and breath with it. The dreamer takes a step, and then another, and then falls, shrieking, and the grandmothers say _no not that, over here over here, look at what came next_. Death floods toward her emptier than darkness and the dreamer forgets, grabs for the brother who is always at her side except not here except not here and the other one is, pock-voiced and funereal, _it’s all right it isn’t you I’ve got you_.

→A new thing has happened. Light from _elsewhere_. The bright-singing voice of God, inviting and inviting and inviting—

→Once, and gone so far away there were only the first thoughts to think it, the _it_ was like this: the ball at the center of down, and the shell at the edge of up, and between them the slow dancers and the sudden dance. _Watch watch watch_, the grandmothers whisper, and their voices become a chorus, and the chorus says something else. The dance wants, and it pushes to the edges of everything, the skin of the universe. The dreamer dreams the dance and the dance dreams and its dreams become things and the things change the dreams. Desire and longing for desire bumble over eager forward and make new things to dance with. A brain growing the wires that form itself, thoughts flow from one substrate into another, and the great curiosity spins and makes and spins and learns. It presses down into the heat at the bottom of everything. It presses up into the cold, and it cracks the vault of heaven. The cold and hard of up yields to the dance, and the lights that they are meet lights that they are not.

→The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her deeper into intimacy with vastness. All through the wideness and flow, she sparkles and the sparkles become thought where there was no thought before. The great slowness remains, soft and wide as the icy cold and all-encompassing sea, and the slowness (drifting, languid) shuffles and reshuffles itself. The sticky and the slippery, the bright and the dark, the moving and the moving for there is no true stillness in the spark-filled substrate, and the sparks become a mind. The dreamer dreams, and others dream with her, not just the ones at her side, not just the bubbles of salt, but the dance that they make. She dreams the dance, and the dance dreams her back. Hello hello hello.

→She moved, scrambling for cover in the grass and trying to line up her next shot. Holden was standing still, pivoting slowly at the waist to put his sights on her. It was a race now, and she was sighted in on his head, ready to pull the trigger and end it, when someone slammed a sledgehammer into her cheek. The other side of her mouth exploded out. The pain barely lasted long enough to notice, and everything was gone.

→_He figured out the body armor_, Tanaka thought. _He’s taking the headshot._

→The round slammed into his back and blew out his chest like someone had swapped his heart with a grenade. Tanaka shifted her aim to Holden, who was already spinning, gun in hand. The big man took a couple more steps and fell over. She lined up on Holden’s chest, then jerked her head as something cut a groove across her scalp. The report of the gunshot arrived a split second later.

→Tanaka rolled onto her back and sat up. She aimed at Burton’s back. He was the more dangerous of the two. Kill him first. She lined up her sights between the big man’s shoulder blades. Took a long breath, let half of it out, and pulled the trigger.

→Moving as little as possible, Tanaka inched toward her gun. When she was able to put her right hand on it, she risked turning her head to see where they were. Holden and Burton were side by side, the girl between them. They were about forty meters away. Not a very long shot. Not for her. They were both wearing old Martian light body armor. The high explosive rounds in her pistol would go right through it. There was some risk of fragmentation hitting the girl, but it wasn’t likely to be fatal. And fuck it. A little bruising might do the bitch some good.

→“Let’s get out of here before more of them show up,” Holden said, and the three of them started walking away.

→_Don’t come check my body_, Tanaka willed at them.

→“We have to go. We have to get out of here. Now,” Holden replied. He sounded angry. Based on her reading of his file, Tanaka would have bet he wasn’t mad at the mechanic. He was angry he’d been forced to shoot someone. For all the shit he’d seen, the Laconian interrogator’s psych evaluation said that Holden had never really grown comfortable with violence.

→“Shit, Cap,” Burton was saying. “I think we shoulda kept her.”

→Tanaka staggered two steps toward the edge of the path and then collapsed on her face. The three slugs from Holden’s gun pressed into her chest where the nanofiber undershirt had caught them, like daggers in the deep-tissue bruise they’d left in her flesh. She ignored the pain and lay very still, holding her breath.

→Before Tanaka could even start to move, Holden’s gun went off three times. She felt the three shots as hammer blows to her sternum. All three, center mass. Kill shots. She hadn’t been certain until that moment that he had it in him.

→“No,” he said. “She doesn’t.”

→Tanaka turned toward the girl and then stopped short. Holden was standing in front of her, his gun in his hand. The eyes that had seemed frightened a moment ago were now flat, emotionless, cold. _That’s bad._