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

"I know."
"It could catch us before we reach the star."
"Maybe your little trick will fool it."
"I might as well face up to it with a pillow."
The scientist smiled her ghastly smile. She said, "We have to try. We have to
try everything. Let me explain what I plan to do at perihelion."
She told Carter that observations by drones and asteroid-based telescopes had
shown that the Transcendent had regularized the red dwarf's magnetic field,
funneling plasma toward one point on photosphere, where it erupted outward in a
permanent flare—the jet that was driving the star toward its fatal rendezvous at
the bottom of the white dwarf's steep gravity well. The scientist believed that
the Transcendent was manipulating the vast energies of the star's magnetic field
by breaking the symmetry of the seething sea of virtual particular pairs that
defined quantum vacuum, generating charged particles ab ovo, redirecting plasma
currents and looped magnetic fields with strengths of thousands of gauss and
areas of thousands of kilometers as a child might play with a toy magnet and a
few iron filings. The probe she'd loaded with a dozen experiments had been lost
with the science platform, but she thought that there was a way of testing at
least one prediction of her theoretical work on symmetry breaking.
She opened a window in Carter's helmet display, showed him a schematic plot of
the slingshot maneuver around the red dwarf.
Carter said, "You have to get that close?"
"The half-life of the strange photons will be very short, a little less than a
millisecond."
"I get it. They won't travel much more than a few hundred kilometers before they
decay." Carter grinned when the scientist stared at him. He said, "Speed of
light's one of those fundamental constants every sailor has to deal with."
"It means that we have to get close to the source, but it also means that the
photon flux will increase anomalously just above the photosphere. There should
be a sudden gradient, or a series of steps… It was one of the experiments my
probe carried."
Carter said, "But it was destroyed, so we have to do the job instead. It's going
to get pretty hot, that close to the star. What kind of temperatures are we
talking about?"
"I don't know. The average surface temperature of the red dwarf is relatively
cool, a little over 3000 degrees Kelvin, but it's somewhat hotter near the base
of the flare, where we have to make our pass."
"Why don't we just skim past the edge of the flare itself? The flare might be
hotter than the surface, but our transit time would be a whole lot less."
"The magnetic fields are very strong around the flare, and they spiral around
it. They could fling us in any direction. Outward if we're lucky, into the star
if we're not. No, I'm going to aim for a spot where the field lines all run in
the same direction. But the fields can change direction suddenly, and there's
the risk of hitting a stray plume of plasma, so I can't fire up the motors until
we're close."
Carter thought of his cutout. He said, "If you have to hit a narrow window, I'm
your man. I can put this ship through the eye of a needle."
The scientist said, "As soon as I see the chance, I'll fire full thrust to
minimize transit time."
"But without the thermal protection of the comet nucleus it'll still be a lot