Yolkin_Kot: переводы

→Zilwicki heaved his massive shoulders. For someone built along normal human rather than dwarf lord lines, that would have been a shrug.

→“How should I know?” he said. “Victor will have to find out from his unnamable but no doubt exalted figures on high.”

→“So who’s bolting?” asked Yana.

→Victor and Yana looked at each other, then down at Anton.

→He pointed to…this and that and the other, all of which looked like nothing much of anything to his two companions. “Think of these as boltholes, if you will.”

→Victor gave him a dark look. “Under very dim lighting, you mean.”

→Usher took a seat some distance away from Trajan. “It’s one hell of a promotion, Victor. If you, ah, look at it in the right light.”

→“You’re being reassigned to the foreign office,” he elaborated. “No longer part of the FIS.”

→“Kevin,” he said, in a neutral tone. Then, nodding to Trajan: “Boss.”

→Yana let them into the room, in response to the buzzer. As soon as they entered, Cachat rose to his feet.

→“Relax, Yana,” said Anton. “They don’t use this sort of condensed display at all—leaving aside the fact that all orbital routes are selected and monitored by computers. No, I slapped this together just to see if my guess was right, which is that traffic is being shifted around to allow for some sudden and unscheduled departures.”

→“Do you mean to tell me that this is how orbital controllers guide spacecraft to a supposedly—ha, ha, I’m dying of laughter here—safe orbit or landing? If so, I’m never flying again. Not even a kite.”

→Yana stared at the screen again. The ex-Scrag looked rather alarmed.

→“It’s an astrogational display showing traffic to and from the planet,” said Cachat. “And that exhausts my knowledge of the matter. I can’t really interpret it.”

→“And what the hell is that?” demanded Tretiakovna. “It looks like scrambled eggs on steroids.”

→Ennui was shoved aside by interest, as Victor and Yana both rose from their chairs and came over to look at the screen.

→Anton’s mouth quirked wryly. “I’m pretty sure the question you should be asking is ‘where,’ not ‘what.’” He pointed to something on the screen. “See that?”

→Clearly, though, Cachat was oblivious to the irony involved. Still half-muttering with disgust, he went on. “So far, I might as well have been putting the question to a streetlight. Except a lamp post would at least shed some light.”

→Taken literally, the gesture might have led to the conclusion that the hard-bitten atheist Victor Cachat had suddenly become a believer, since there was nothing beyond the ceiling other than the heavens. The large suite the three people were sharing was on the top floor of a former luxury hotel in Haven’s capital that had been been sequestered for its own purposes decades earlier by the Legislaturalist secret police. After the revolution—the most recent one, that is—the new regime had tried but failed to find the rightful owners, since they’d all died or vanished. So, not knowing what else to do, they’d turned it into a combination safe house and luxury resort for guests of the government.

→“I don’t know,” said Cachat, almost muttering the words. “I’ve been trying to get an answer to that very question from”—his finger pointed to the ceiling—“unnamable but no doubt exalted figures on high.”