"Michael McCollum - Antares 02 - Antares Passage" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

to arrive at the star made note of this fact a few centuries later when they recorded more neutrinos than
expected pouring forth from the star's fiery interior. It was obvious even then that the star had not long to
live. Still, a stellar lifetime is a very long time, and no one truly expected the end to come as quickly as it
did.

At 17:32 hours on 3 August 2512, the star exhausted the last of its carbon fuel. Within seconds, the old
cycle of contraction and heating began again. This time things were different, however. For now, the
star's core was rich in iron, and iron cannot be fused to produce energy. Rather, fusing iron nuclei rob
energy from their surroundings. With its core hopelessly chilled by iron fusion reactions, the star gave up
its ages-old fight with gravity. The core began its final collapse.

As billions upon countless billions of tonnes of matter fell inward, they gave up the potential energy they
had stored through the millennia. This "energy of position" reappeared as heat, causing the temperature at
the center of the star to rise rapidly toward infinity. Some of this heat was radiated into the middle layers
of the star's atmosphere; which, unlike the core, were still rich in unburned hydrogen. A furious
thermonuclear reaction resulted. In the blink of an eye, the star began to produce as much energy each
second as it had previously radiated away in its entire lifetime.

The end came quickly as the star exploded in the most titanic explosion ever witnessed by human beings.



CHAPTER 1
It was high noon when the commercial shuttle touched down at Homeport Spaceport. Even so, the
Antares Nebula was clearly visible in Alta's deep purple sky if one knew where to look. It had been
three years since the nova had first burned bright in the Altan heavens, and while Antares was no longer
the eye-searing spark it had once been, the supernova's power and its relative proximity assured that it
would be visible in daylight for several years to come.

Fleet Captain Richard Arthur Drake unstrapped from his seat and stood to remove his kit bag from the
shuttle's overhead baggage compartment. Around him, four dozen fellow passengers did the same. Then
each man and woman queued up in the shuttle's center aisle and waited patiently for the landing bridge to
be maneuvered across the shuttle's wing and attached to the midships airlock.

Drake was of medium height, with a lean, muscular figure. His hair, which he wore in the close-cropped
style of a military spacer, was black with a touch of gray around the edges. A tiny network of worry lines
emanated from the corners of his green eyes, and a whitish scar cut one of his eyebrows into two unequal
sections. As he moved slowly down the aisle, he did so with the smooth motion of one who has learned
to maneuver under widely varying conditions of acceleration and gravity.

The crowd was slow to disembark. As each passenger reached the storage lockers just forward of the
midships airlock, he or she would stop and sort through the carry-on luggage, blocking the aisle in the
process. Normally, Drake would have found his patience running short at the continued delay. Not
today. After six months spent breathing the reconstituted effluvium that passed for breathing gas aboard a
starship, he was more than happy to merely stand and inhale deeply of the virgin air that wafted in
through the open airlock.

Eventually, he found himself across the landing bridge and inside the terminal building. He threaded his
way through the waiting crowd and was about to board a slidewalk for the main terminal building when a
familiar voice called out: "Richard!"