"Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

I turn to Greta. I can't believe this is happening again.

"End it," I say.

Greta steps toward Suzy.

You know that "as soon as I awoke I knew everything was wrong" cliche? You've probably heard it a
thousand times, in a thousand bars across the Bubble, wherever ship crews swap tall tales over flat
company-subsidized beer. The trouble is that sometimes that's exactly the way it happens. I never felt
good after a period in the surge tank. But the only time I had ever come around feeling anywhere near
this bad was after that trip I took to the edge of the Bubble.

Mulling this, but knowing there was nothing I could do about it until I was out of the tank, it took me half
an hour of painful work to free myself from the connections. Every muscle fiber in my body felt as though
it had been shredded. Unfortunately, the sense of wrongness didn't end with the tank. The Blue Goose
was much too quiet. We should have been heading away from the last exit aperture after our routing. But
the distant, comforting rumble of the fusion engines wasn't there at all. That meant we were in free-fall.

Not good.

I floated out of the tank, grabbed a handhold and levered myself around to view the other two tanks.
Ray's largest BVM stared back radiantly from the cowl of his tank. The bio indices were all in the green.
Ray was still unconscious, but there was nothing wrong with him. Same story with Suzy. Some
automated system had decided I was the only one who needed waking.

A few minutes later I had made my way to the same observation blister I'd used to check the ship before
the surge. I pushed my head into the scuffed glass halfdome and looked around.

We'd arrived somewhere. The Blue Goose was sitting in a huge zero-gravity parking bay. The chamber
was an elongated cylinder, hexagonal in cross-section. The walls were a smear of service machinery:
squat modules, snaking umbilical lines, the retracted cradles of unused docking berths. Whichever way I
looked I saw other ships locked onto cradles. Every make and class you could think of, every possible
configuration of hull design compatible with aperture transitions. Service lights threw a warm golden glow
on the scene. Now and then the whole chamber was bathed in the stuttering violet flicker of a cutting
torch.

It was a repair facility.

I was just starting to mull on that when I saw something extend itself from the wall of the chamber. It was
a telescopic docking tunnel, groping toward our ship. Through the windows in the side of the tunnel I saw
figures floating, pulling themselves along hand over hand.

I sighed and started making my way to the airlock.

By the time I reached the lock they were already through the first stage of the cycle. Nothing wrong with
that—there was no good reason to prevent foreign parties boarding a vessel—but it was just a tiny bit
impolite. But perhaps they'd assumed we were all asleep.

The door slid open.