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

race was being determined. While Carter and the rest of the expedition had slept
in their coffins deep in the heart of the comet, the Fanatics had invested and
destroyed a dozen settlements in Keid's asteroid belt, and the Keidians had
fought back and destroyed one of the Fanatics' huge starships. Compared to this
great struggle, Carter's fate was less than that of a drop of water in a stormy
ocean, a thought both humbling and uplifting.
Well, his life might be insignificant, but he wasn't about to trust it to a
dying girl with no combat experience. He fingertip-swam to the stern of the pod,
and opened a panel and rigged a manual cutout before he climbed back inside. He
had been working for six hours. He was exhausted and sweating hard inside the
p-suit, but he couldn't take it off because the pod's atmosphere had been vented
and most of its systems had been shut down, part of his plan to fool the Fanatic
into thinking it was a dead hulk. The interior was dark and cold. The lights
either side of his helmet cast sharp shadows. Frost glistened on struts exposed
where he had stripped away paneling.
The scientist lay inside her sealed coffin, her half-ruined face visible through
the little window. She looked asleep, but when Carter maneuvered beside her she
opened her good eye and looked at him. He plugged in a patch cord and heard some
kind of music, a simple progressions of riffs for percussion and piano and
trumpet and saxophone. The scientist said that it was her favorite piece. She
said that she wanted to listen to it one more time.
Carter said, "You should let the coffin put you to sleep. Before—"
The scientist coughed wetly. Blood freckled the faceplate of her coffin. "Before
I die."
"They gave me some science training before they put me on this mission, ma'am.
Just tell me what to do."
"Quit calling me 'ma'am,'" the scientist said, and closed her good eye as a
trumpet floated a long, lovely line of melody above a soft shuffle of
percussion. "Doesn't he break your heart? That's Miles Davis, playing in New
York hundreds of years ago. Making music for angels."
"It's interesting. It's in simple six/eight time, but the modal changes—" The
scientist was staring at Carter; he felt himself blush and wondered if she could
see it. He said, "I inherited perfect pitch from my mother. She sang in an opera
chorus before she married my father and settled down to raise babies and farm
vacuum organisms."
"Don't try to break it down," the scientist said. "You have to listen to the
whole thing. The totality, it's sublime. I'd rather die listening to this than
die in hibernation."
"You're not going—"
"I've set down everything I remember about the work that was done before the
attack. I'll add it to the observations I make as we whip around the star and
then squirt all the data to Keid. Maybe they can make something useful of it,
work out the Transcendent's tricks with the magnetic fields, the gravity
tethers, the rest of it…" She closed her eye, and breathed deeply. Fluid rattled
in her lungs. She said softly, as if to herself, "So many dead. We have to make
their deaths worthwhile."
Carter had barely gotten to know his shipmates, recruited from all over, before
they'd gone into hibernation, but the scientist had lost good friends and
colleagues.
He said, "The singleship is still accelerating."