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

there might be other—"
"All we have to do is live long enough to find out everything we can about the
Transcendent's engineering project and squirt it home on a tight beam." The
scientist's smile was dreadful. Her teeth were filmed with blood. "Quit arguing,
sailor. Don't you have work to do?"
A trail of debris tumbled away behind the pod, slowly spreading out, bright
edges flashing here and there as they caught the light of the red dwarf. Carter
pressurized p-suits and switched on their life-support systems and transponders
before he jettisoned them. Maybe the Fanatic would think that they contained
warm bodies. He sprayed great arcs of foam into the hard vacuum and kicked away
the empty canisters. The chance of any of the debris hitting the Fanatic's
singleship was infinitesimally small, but a small chance was better than none at
all, and the work kept his mind from the awful prospect of being captured.
Sternward, the shattered comet nucleus was a fuzzy speck trailing foreshortened
banners of light across the star-spangled sky. The expedition had nudged it from
its orbit and buried the science platform inside its nucleus, sleeping for a
whole year like an army in a fairytale as it fell toward the red dwarf. The
mission had been a last desperate attempt to try to learn something of the
Transcendent's secrets, but as the comet nucleus neared the red dwarf, and the
expedition woke and the scientists started their work, one of the Fanatic drones
that policed the vicinity of the star somehow detected the science platform, and
the Fanatics sent a single-ship to deal with it. Like all their warships, it
moved very fast, with brutal acceleration that would have mashed ordinary humans
to a thin jelly. It had arrived less than thirty seconds behind a warning
broadcast by a spotter observatory at the edge of Keid's heliopause; the crew of
the science platform hadn't stood a chance.
The singleship lay directly between the comet and the lifepod now. It had turned
around and was decelerating at eight gravities. At the maximum magnification his
p-suit's visor could give him, Carter could just make out the faint scratch of
its exhaust, but he was unable to resolve the ship itself. In the other
direction, the red dwarf star simmered at the bottom of a kind of well of
luminous dark. Its nuclear fires were banked low, radiating mostly in infrared.
Carter could stare steadily at it with only a minimum of filtering. The
sharp-edged shadows of the vast deployment of solar sails were sinking beyond
one edge as the jet dawned in the opposite direction, a brilliant white thread
brighter than the fierce point of the white dwarf star rising just beyond it.
Before the Transcendent had begun its work, the red dwarf had swung around the
smaller but more massive white dwarf in a wide elliptical orbit, at its closest
approaching within twenty AU, the distance of Uranus from the Sun. Now it was
much closer and still falling inward. Scientists speculated that the
Transcendent planned to use the tidal effects of a close transit to tear apart
the red dwarf, but they'd had less than forty hours to study the Transcendent's
engineering before the Fanatic's singleship struck.
Hung in his p-suit a little way from the lifepod, the huge target of the red
dwarf in one direction, the vast starscape in the other, Carter Cho resolved to
make the best of his fate. The Universe was vast and inhuman, and so was war.
Out there, in battles around stars whose names—Alpha Cen-tauri, Epsilon Eridani,
Tau Ceti, Lalande 21185, Lacaille 8760, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Indi, Groombridge
1618, Groombridge 34, 82 Eridani, 70 Ophiuchi, Delta Pavonis, Eta
Cassiopeiae—were like a proud role call of mythic heroes, the fate of the human