（外文电子版资料）Charles Stross - The Boys.pdf

The Boys Charles Stross The boys scuttled over the concrete slab like cockroaches, exoskeletons a dull bronze in the orange glare that passed for daylight. A dense mist concealed rocks and ankles and a corpse. The roar of a police carrier echoed through the trees, a pulsing racket of authority: the boys didnt care. By the time the patrol arrived the corpse was brain dead, stripped of eyes and kidneys and viscera as well as bionics. The boys had left their incestuous joke with the corpse; a noose. Darkness descended on the area, a protective screen for the armoured hovercraft as it swept through the gap in the forest, cruising slowly between fungus-streaked biomass modules. Among the video surfaces that lined the cabin the Hunter sat bolt upright; her screens scintillated as she focussed on the partially-dismembered cadaver. Boys; Hes been dead for half an hour. The constables flinched and whined; she noticed them and moderated her voice. They were sensitive units, too valuable to waste. Nothing here, she told the autopilot. Get the skull, then take us home. The small noises of relief were drowned out by the roar of the fans. Some of the cyborged dogs muttered and scratched their implants as the carrier turned and rumbled back towards the castle. In the wake of the hovercraft the cobblestones were darker than before, by an increment of congealing blood. The castle, a cube with edges a kilometer long, shone with an ominous red glow that filtered through the grime of centuries. The degenerate bioforms of the landscape twisted away from the laser-veined monolith of lunar basalt; nerve-trees bubbled into fatty shapes and acanthopods bristled as they crept past. The clouds above it reflected a red glow, megawatts of energy expended in a display of power. The ceiling of the world, a continuation of the floor, hung thirty kilome