"Paul J. McAuley - Winning Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J) “We aren’t down yet,” Carver said. He was grinning like a fool. He be-lieved
that the worst was over. The escape pod fell away from Texas IX, heading out toward its moon. It was almost there when Mr. Kanza’s scow overtook it. **** Soon after it had formed, while its core had been still molten, something big had smashed into Texas IX’s solitary moon. It had excavated a wide, deep basin in one side of the moon, and seismic waves traveling through the crust and core had focused on the area antipodal to the impact, jostling and lift-ing the surface, breaking crater rims and intercrater areas into a vast maze of hills and valleys, opening vents that flooded crater floors with fresh lava. That was where the escape pod came down, a thousand kilometers from the moon’s only settlement, a hundred or so hardscrabble ranches strung along the shore of a shallow, hypersaline sea. The scow, shooting past at a relative velocity of twenty klicks per second, had cooked the pod with a microwave burst, killing the pod’s AI and crip-pling most of its control systems. Although the pod’s aerobraking surfaces gave Carver a little leeway as it plowed through the moon’s thin atmo-sphere, it smashed down hard and skidded a long way across a lava plain; despite the web holding Carver to the couch and the impact foam that flooded the pod’s interior, he was knocked unconscious. angle, the hatch was open, and Useless Beauty was gone. Carver was bruised over most of his body and his nose was tender and bleeding, possibly broken, but he was not badly hurt. He clawed his way through dissolving strands of impact foam and clambered out of the hatch, discovered that the pod lay at the end of a long furrow, its skin scarred, scraped, and discolored, and radiating an intense heat he could feel through his pressure suit. Big patches of spindly desert vegetation burned briskly on either side, lofting long reefs of smoke into the white sky. Useless Beauty’s tank stood on top of a ridge of overturned dirt, its black cylinder balanced on four many-jointed legs, two more limbs raised as if in prayer toward the sky. Carver was surprised and grateful to see it; he’d thought that the !Cha had taken the opportunity to make a run for it. “This is only a brief respite,” Useless Beauty said, as Carver clambered up the ridge. “Your owner’s ship has swung far beyond this moon, but it is braking hard. It will soon be back.” “Then we can’t stay here,” Carver said. “We have to find a place to hide out until someone from the settlement comes to investigate.” The tank’s two upper limbs swung down, aiming clusters of tools and sensors straight at Carver, and Useless Beauty said, “This is the part of your plan that I do not understand. This moon is owned by the Collective. You are a runaway slave. Surely they will side with your master. And if they do not, they will claim you for |
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