"Paul J. McAuley - Winning Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

capture it, but it broke free after we brought it aboard our ship. At once, it began to
consume the structure of the ship. Dr. Smith went outside and successfully cut it
away, but by then the fusion motor had been badly damaged, and it began to
overheat. When Dr. Smith attempted to repair it, the cooling system exploded, and
ruptured her suit. She died before she could get back inside, and I was forced to use
the escape pod. I got away only a few minutes before the ship was destroyed.”

“What happened to the thing you found?”

“If the neutrino flux is no longer detectable, I must assume that it was unable
to return to the brown dwarf. Without a sufficient concentration of matter to weave a
suitable habitat around itself,” Useless Beauty said, “it would have evaporated.”

It was a good story, and Carver believed about half it. He was pretty certain
that the !Cha and Dr. Smith had captured something, Elder Culture artifact, weird
mathematics, and that it had begun to destroy or transform their ship—it would
explain why the composition of the thread Carver had found wrapped around Dr.
Smith’s arm didn’t match anything in the library of the ship’s lab—but Carver was
pretty sure that Dr. Smith hadn’t died in some kind of accident. It was more likely
that Useless Beauty had murdered her because it wanted to keep what they’d found
to itself and that prize was hidden somewhere inside its tank. But because he needed
the !Cha’s help—the casing of its tank was tougher than diamond, and its limbs were
equipped with all kinds of gnarly tools, trying to fight it would be like going head to
head with a battle drone—he didn’t give voice to his doubts, said that it was a damn
shame about losing Dr. Smith and the ship, he hoped to bring it better luck.

Useless Beauty did not reply, and its silence stretched as the escape pod
hurtled toward Sheffield’s ring system. Carver sipped sweetened apple pulp,
watched the tug grow closer, watched the scow change course, half a mil-lion
kilometers ahead, watched his own track on the navigational plot. He wasn’t a pilot,
but he knew his math, and his plan depended on nothing more complicated than
ordinary Newtonian mechanics, a straightforward balance between gravity and
distance and time and delta vee.

That’s what he tried to tell himself, anyhow.
 The rings filled the sky ahead, dozens of pale, parallel arcs hundreds of
ki-lometers across, separated by gaps of varying widths. At T minus ten seconds,
Carver handed control to the pod’s AI. It lit the pod’s motor at exactly T0. Two
seconds later, the comm beeped: another message from Mr. Kanza.

Carver ignored it.

The tug was changing course too, but Carver was almost on the ring system
now, falling toward a particular gap he’d chosen with the help of the escape pod’s
navigational system. He watched it with all of his concentra-tion—he was finding it
hard to believe in Newtonian mechanics now his life depended on it.

But there it was, at the edge of one of the arcs of ice and dust: a tiny grain
flashing in raw sunlight: a shepherd moon. In less than a minute, it resolved into a
pebble, a boulder, a pitted siding of dirty ice. As it flashed past, the pod’s AI lit the