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

And as part of a collective, every individual must subsume her finer instincts
to the greater good. Do you understand?"
"With respect, ma'am, what I understand is that I'm a sailor with combat
experience and you're a science geek." She was looking through him again, or
maybe focussing on stuff fed to her retina by the data lens. He said, "What kind
of science geek are you, anyway?"
"Quantum vacuum theory." The scientist closed her eye and clenched her teeth and
gasped, then said, her voice smaller and tighter, "I was hoping to find out how
the Transcendent manipulates the magnetic fields that control the jet."
"Are you okay?"
"Just a little twinge."
Carter studied the diagnostic panel of the coffin, but he had no idea what it
was trying to tell him. "You should let this box put you to sleep. When you wake
up, we'll be back at Pasadena, and they'll fix you right up."
"I know how to run the lifepod, and as long as I have control of it, you can't
put me to sleep. We're still falling along the comet's trajectory. We're going
to eyeball the Transcendent's engineering up close. If I can't learn something
from that, I'll give you permission to boot my ass into vacuum, turn around, and
go look for another scientist."
"Maybe you can steer this ship, ma'am, but you don't have combat training."
"There's nothing to fight. We outran the hunter-killers."
Carter said, "So we did. But maybe you should use the radar, check out the
singleship. Just before you staged your little mutiny, I saw that it was turning
back. I think it's going to try to hunt us down."
Carter stripped coffins and ripped out panels and padding from the walls. He
disconnected canisters of the accelerant foam that flooded coffins to cradle
hibernating sleepers. He pulled a dozen spare p-suits from their racks. He
sealed the scientist's coffin and suited up and vented the lifepod and dumped
everything out of the lock.
The idea was that the pilot of the singleship would spot the debris, think that
the pod had imploded, and abandon the chase. Carter thought there was a fighting
chance it would work, but when he had told her what he was going to do, the
scientist had said, "It won't fool him for a moment."
Carter said, "Also, when he chases after us, there's a chance he'll run into
some of the debris. If the relative velocity is high enough, even a grain of
dust could do some serious damage."
"He can blow us out of the sky with his X-ray laser. So why would he want to
chase us?"
"For the same reason the hunter-killer didn't explode when it found us. Think it
through, ma'am. He wants to take a prisoner. He wants to extract information
from a live body."
He watched her think about that.
She said, "If he does catch up with us, you'll get your wish to become a martyr.
There's enough antiberyllium left in the motor to make an explosion that'll
light up the whole system. But that's a last resort. The singleship is still in
turnaround, we have a good head start, and we're only twenty-eight million
kilometers from perihelion. If we get there first, we can whip around the red
dwarf, change our course at random. Unless the Fanatic guesses our exit
trajectory, that'll buy us plenty of time."
"He'll have plenty of time to find us again. We're a long way from home, and