"Rats Of The System" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

was pushing a shade under a gee of acceleration; most humans who had ever lived
had spent their entire lives in that kind of pull, but Carter's fingers were
cramping inside the heavy gloves, and it felt as if the utility belt were trying
to amputate him at the waist. The vast dividing line of the jet rushed toward
him. Heat beat through his p-suit. If its cooling system failed for a second,
he'd cook like a joint of meat in his father's stone oven. Or the Fanatic could
burn him out of the sky with its X-ray laser, or magnetic flux could rip the pod
apart…
Carter didn't care. He was riding his ship rodeo-style toward a flare of fusion
light a thousand kilometers wide. He whooped with defiant glee—
—and then, just like that, the pod was somewhere else.
After a minute, Carter remembered to switch on his com. The scientist said,
"What the fuck did you just do?"
It took them a while to find out.
Carter had aimed the pod at the edge of the jet, hoping that it would be flung
away at a random tangent across the surface of the red dwarf, hoping that it
would survive long enough to transmit all of the data collected by the
scientist's experiment. But now the red dwarf was a rusty nailhead dwindling
into the starscape behind them, the bright point of the white dwarf several
seconds of arc beyond it. In the blink of an eye, the pod had gained escape
velocity and had been translated across tens of millions of kilometers of space.
"It had to be the Transcendent," the scientist said.
Carter had repressurized the pod and the cooling system was working at a flat
roar, but it was still as hot as a sauna. He had taken off his helmet and shaken
out his sweat-soaked dreadlocks, but because the scientist's bums made her
sensitive to heat, her coffin was still sealed. He hung in front of it, looking
at her through the little window. He said, "I took the only chance we had left,
and my luck held."
"No magnetic field could have flung us so far, or so fast. It had to be
something to do with the Transcendent. Perhaps it canceled our interia. For a
few seconds we became as mass-less as a photon, we achieved light speed…"
"My luck held," Carter said. "I hit those magnetic fields just right."
"Check the deep radar, sailor. There's no sign of the Fanatic's singleship. It
was right on our tail. If magnetic fields had anything to do with it, it would
have been flung in the same direction as us."
Carter checked the deep radar. There was no sign of the singleship. He
remembered the glimpse of the silver sphere sailing serenely around the star,
and said, "I thought the Transcendents wanted to leave us alone. That's why they
quit the Solar System. That's why they only reengineer uninhabited systems…"
"You kept rats when you were a kid. If one got out, you'd put her back. If two
started to fight, you'd do something about it. How did your rats feel when you
reached into their cage to separate them?"
Carter grinned. "If we're rats, what are the Fanatics?"
"Rats with delusions of grandeur. Crazy rats who think they're carrying out
God's will, when really they're no better than the rest of us. I wonder what
that Fanatic must be thinking. Just for a moment, he was touched by the hand of
his God…"
"What is it?"
"I've finished processing the data stream from my experiment. When we
encountered the edge of the flare, there was a massive, sudden increase in