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

motor again. The brief blip of acceleration and the momen-tum the pod had stolen
from the moon made a small change in its delta vee; as it swung around the gas giant,
the difference between the trajectory of the pod and the tug widened perceptibly.

The tug didn’t have enough fuel to catch up with the pod now, but beyond
Sheffield, Mr. Kanza’s scow was changing course, and a few minutes later, a Navy
cutter shot away from the dock facility, and the comm chan-nels were suddenly alive
with chatter: the salvage company’s gigs and tugs; a couple of ships in transit
between the wormholes; the Navy garrison, order-ing both Mr. Kanza and Carver
White to stand to and await interception.

Carver couldn’t obey even if he wanted to. Less than a quarter of the pod’s
fuel remained and it was traveling very fast now, boosted by the slingshot through
Sheffield’s steep gravity well. With Mr. Kanza’s scow and the Navy cutter in
pursuit, it hurtled toward one of the wormhole throats. Carver had no doubt that the
scow would follow him through, but he believed he had enough of an edge to make
it to where he wanted to go, especially now that the Navy was involved. Someone in
the garrison must have discovered Rider Jackson’s deal with Mr. Kanza, and that
meant the cutter would be more likely to try to stop Mr. Kanza’s scow first.

The wormhole throat was a round dark mirror just over a kilometer across,
twinkling with photons emitted by asymmetrical pair decay, framed by a chunky ring
that housed the braid of strange matter that kept the throat open, all this embedded in
the flat end of a chunk of rock that had been sculpted to a smooth cone by the
nameless Elder Culture that had built the wormhole network a couple of million years
ago. The pod hit it dead center, the radio chatter cut off, light flared, and the pod
emerged halfway around the galaxy, above a planet shrouded in dense white clouds,
shining pitilessly bright in the glare of a giant F5 star.

The planet, Texas IX, had a hot, dense, runaway greenhouse atmosphere—
even Useless Beauty’s tank could not have survived long in the searing storms that
scoured its surface—but it also had a single moon that had been planoformed by
Boxbuilders. That was where Carver wanted to go. He took back control of the pod
and reconfigured it, extending wide braking sur-faces of tough polycarbon, and lit
the motor. It was a risky maneuver—if the angle of attack was too shallow, the pod
would skip away into deep space with no hope of return, and if it was too steep, the
pod would burn up—but aerobraking was the only way he could shed enough
velocity.

Like a match scratching a tiny flare across a wall of white marble, the pod cut
a chord above Texas IX’s cloud tops. Carver was buffeted by vibration and pinned
to the couch by deceleration that peaked at eight gees. He screamed into the vast
shuddering noise; screamed with exhilaration and fear. Useless Beauty maintained its
unsettling silence. Then the flames that filled the for-ward cameras died back and the
pod rose above the planet’s nightside.

The stars came out, all at once.

Useless Beauty’s affectless voice said, “That was interesting.”