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

“I’ve had him a year. He’s never given me any trouble, and he won’t give us
any trouble now,” Mr. Kanza said, pointing a finger at Carver. “Can you guess why I
went to all the trouble of buying out your brother’s contract?”

Carver shrugged, as if it meant nothing to him.

Mr. Kanza said, “You really should show me some gratitude. Not only have I
already saved your brother’s life, but if everything works out, I’ll void his contract,
and void yours too. You’ll both be free.”

“Meanwhile, you’re holding him hostage, to make sure that I’ll do what-ever it
is you want me to do.”

Mr. Kanza told Rider Jackson, “There it is. I have his brother as insurance,
the tug will fly itself, and if he does get it into his head to try something stupid, I can
intervene by wire. If worst comes to worst, I’ll be the one short a flight engineer and
a good little ship; as far as you’re concerned, this is a risk-free proposition.”

“As long as the Navy doesn’t find out about it,” Rider Jackson said.

“We’ve been over that,” Mr. Kanza said.

Carver saw that there was something tense and wary behind Mr. Kanza’s
smile, and realized that he had worked up some reckless plan to get himself out of
the hole, that he needed Rider Jackson’s help to do it, and he needed Carver too.
 “We’ve talked it up and down,” Mr. Kanza told Rider Jackson. “There’s no
good reason why the Navy should know anything about this until you buy out your
service.”

Rider Jackson studied him, then shrugged and said, “Okay.”

Just like that. Two days later, Carver was aboard Mr. Kanza’s tug, cooled
down in hypersleep while the small ship aimed itself at the brown dwarf, Ganesh
Five B.

****

Mr. Kanza made extensive use of a data mining AI to track down skilled prisoners of
war who were being used as common laborers, and to look for business
opportunities overlooked by his rivals. The data miner had linked a news item about
an alien and an astrophysicist who had disappeared after hiring a small yacht just
before the beginning of the war with an academic article by the astrophysicist, Liu
Chen Smith, that described an anomalous neutrino flux emitted by a pinpoint source
within a permanent storm in the smoky atmosphere of a brown dwarf, Ganesh Five
B. It was possible, the data miner suggested, that the alien, a !Cha that called itself
Useless Beauty, had bankrolled an expedition to find out if the neutrino source was
some kind of Elder Culture artifact.

Although most of the systems linked by wormhole networks were littered with