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

sharp-edged horizon, and something shot out of me dust, heading straight for
Carter. It looked a little like a silvery squid, with a bullet-shaped head that
trailed a dozen tentacles tipped with claws and blades. It wrapped itself around
an icy pinnacle on the other side of the hole and reared up, weaving this way
and that as if studying him. Probably trying to decide where to begin unseaming
him, Carter thought, and pointed the welding pistol at it, ready to die if only
he could take one of the enemy with him. The thing surged forward—
Dust and gas blasted out of the hole. The scientist had ignited the lifepod's
motor. The fullerene cloth shot straight up, straining like a sail in a squall,
and the hunter-killer smashed into it and tore it free from the clips Carter had
so laboriously secured, tumbling past him at the center of a writhing knot of
cloth.
Carter dove through the hatch in the pod's blunt nose. Gravity's ghost clutched
him, and he tumbled head over heels and slammed into the rear bulkhead as the
pod shook free of its hiding place.
Humans had settled the extensive asteroid belt around Keid, the cool Kl
component of the triple star system 40 Eridani, more than a century ago. The
first generation, grown from templates stored in a bus-sized seeder starship,
had built a domed settlement on Neuvo California, an asteroid half the size of
Earth's Moon, and planted its cratered plains of water ice with vast fields of
vacuum organisms. Succeeding generations spread through Keid's asteroid belt,
building domes and tenting crevasses and ravines, raising families, becoming
expert in balancing the ecologies of small, closed systems and creating new
varieties of vacuum organisms, writing and performing heroic operettas, trading
information and works of art on the interstellar net that linked Earth's
far-flung colonies in the brief golden age before Earth's AIs achieved
transcendence.
The Keidians were a practical, obdurate people. As far as they were concerned,
the Hundred Minute War, which ended with the reduction of Earth and the flight
of dozens of Transcendent AIs from the Solar System, was a distant and
incomprehensible matter that had nothing to do with the ordinary business of
their lives. Someone wrote an uninspired operetta about it; someone else revived
the lost art of the symphony, and for a few years her mournful eight-hour
memoriam was considered by many in the stellar colonies to be a new pinnacle of
human art. Very few Keidians took much notice when a Transcendent demolished
Sirius B and used the trillions of tons of heavy elements it mined from the
white dwarf's core to build a vast ring in close orbit around Sirius A; no one
worried overmuch when other Transcendents began to strip-mine gas giants in
other uninhabited systems. Everyone agreed that the machine intelligences were
pursuing some vast, obscure plan that might take millions of years to complete,
that they were as indifferent to the low comedy of human life as gardeners were
to the politics of ants.
But then self-styled transhuman Fanatics declared a jihad against anyone who
refused to acknowledge the Transcendents as gods. They dropped a planet-killer
on half-terraformed Mars. They scorched colonies on the moons of Jupiter and
Saturn and Neptune. They dispatched warships starward. The fragile web of
chatter and knowledge-based commerce that linked the stellar colonies began to
unravel.
And just over six hundred days ago, a Transcendent barreled into the Keidian
system, swinging past Keid as it decelerated from close to light speed and