"Baxter, Stephen - On The Orion Line" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

"Two minutes to impact," Jeru said. I didn’t have a working chronometer; she must have been
counting the seconds.

"Seal up." Till began to check the integrity of Pael’s suit; Jeru and I helped each other. Face
seal, glove seal, boot seal, pressure check. Water check, oh-two flow, cee-oh-two scrub . . .

When we were sealed I risked poking my head above Till’s chair.

The Ghost ship filled space. The craft was kilometers across, big enough to have dwarfed the
poor, doomed Brief Life Burns Brightly. It was a tangle of silvery rope of depthless
complexity, occluding the stars and the warring fleets. Bulky equipment pods were suspended
in the tangle.

And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding like beads of mercury. I could see how the
yacht’s emergency lights were returning crimson highlights from the featureless hides of
Ghosts, so they looked like sprays of blood droplets across that shining perfection.

"Ten seconds," Till called. "Brace."

Suddenly silver ropes thick as tree trunks were all around us, looming out of the sky.

And we were thrown into chaos again.

I heard a grind of twisted metal, a scream of air. The hull popped open like an eggshell. The
last of our air fled in a gush of ice crystals, and the only sound I could hear was my own
breathing.

The crumpling hull soaked up some of our momentum.

But then the base of the yacht hit, and it hit hard.

The chair was wrenched out of my grasp, and I was hurled upward. There was a sudden pain
in my left arm. I couldn’t help but cry out.

I reached the limit of my tether and rebounded. The jolt sent further waves of pain through my
arm. From up there, I could see the others were clustered around the base of the First Officer’s
chair, which had collapsed.

I looked up. We had stuck like a dart in the outer layers of the Ghost ship. There were shining
threads arcing all around us, as if a huge net had scooped us up.

Jeru grabbed me and pulled me down. She jarred my bad arm, and I winced. But she ignored
me, and went back to working on Till. He was under the fallen chair.

Pael started to take a syrette of dope from the sachet around his neck.

Jeru knocked his hand away. "You always use the casualty’s," she hissed. "Never your own."

Pael looked hurt, rebuffed. "Why?"