"Paul J. McAuley - Stars 01 - Four Hundred Billion Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Four Hundred Billion Stars
Paul J. McAuley
[COVER]

v1.0 by the N.E.R.D's. Scanned, page numbers removed, paragraphs joined, formatted, common OCR
errors have been removed and a full spell check is complete. Full read-through still required.

v1.1 Full read through completed by the N.E.R.D's

CONTENTS

Part 1 - Camp Zero
Part 2 - The Hold
Part 3 - The Keep

Part 4 - At The Core

Part 5 - Four Hundred Billion Suns

1. CAMP ZERO
They took away Dorthy Yoshida's clothes and gave her a cut-down gee-suit, doped her and fitted her
into a dropcapsule, flooded it with impact gel and sealed the hatch. And then they shot her ass-backward
out of orbit.

For a long minute she was falling free. Oxygen hissed in her facemask and meaningless indicator lights
blinked centimetres from her face through the distorting gel, but it all seemed like something she was
watching on a trivia show. She knew that her detachment came from the tranquillizer, but that didn't
matter either. She was floating beyond it all.

And it was good to be alone at last. Despite her implant, she had never been entirely free of the emotions
of the crew and other passengers in the ship's cramped quarters, forever colouring her thoughts and
seeping into her dreams like bad gas. A not-inconsiderable reason why she had wanted to become an
astronomer at the end of her contract with the Kamali-Silver Institute had been the opportunity it
afforded for escape from the seething energies of civilization, the storms of emotion that broke upon her
day after day, eroding her resources as steadily as the sea erodes the land. The weeks in transit had been
as exhausting as a year in any city. So the minute of freefall was a drop of nirvana: salt crystal or
snowflake, she dissolved in it.

Then the retrojets cut in. The impact gel gloved the length of her body… and relaxed. For a moment she
was weightless again.

A jerk!

And another!

The dropcapsule groaned. Something working behind Dorthy's cloudy detachment told her that it must
be entering the atmosphere. They'd explained the sequence of events while she was being prepared for
the descent, and she tried and failed to remember what came next as her weight began to build again,
counter-balanced by the resistance of the gel. The dropcapsule vibrated, its thin skin plucked as it
ploughed the upper air. Interference patterns raced through the gel, rocking Dorthy's body, shattering the