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

"You're awake," a man said. "Captain Thomas Gundlupet of the Blue Goose, isn't it?"

"Guess so," I said.

"Mind if we come in?"

There were about half a dozen of them, and they were already coming in. They all wore slightly timeworn
ochre overalls, flashed with too many company sigils. My hackles rose. I really didn't like the way they
were barging in.

"What's up?" I said. "Where are we?"

"Where do you think?" the man said. He had a face full of stubble, with bad yellow teeth. I was
impressed with that. Having bad teeth took a lot of work these days. It was years since I'd seen anyone
who had the same dedication to the art.

"I'm really hoping you're not going to tell me we're still stuck in Arkangel system," I said.

"No, you made it through the gate."

"And?"

"There was a screw-up. Routing error. You didn't pop out of the right aperture."

"Oh, Christ." I took off my bib cap. "It never rains. Something went wrong with the insertion, right?"
"Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows how these things happen? All we know is you aren't supposed to be
here."

"Right. And where is 'here'?"

"Saumlaki Station. Schedar sector."

He said it as though he was already losing interest, as if this was a routine he went through several times a
day.

He might have been losing interest. I wasn't.

I'd never heard of Saumlaki Station, but I'd certainly heard of Schedar sector. Schedar was a K
supergiant out toward the edge of the Local Bubble. It defined one of the seventy-odd navigational
sectors across the whole Bubble.

Did I mention the Bubble already?

You know how the Milky Way galaxy looks; you've seen it a thousand times, in paintings and computer
simulations. A bright central bulge at the Galactic core, with lazily curved spiral arms flung out from that
hub, each arm composed of hundreds of billions of stars, ranging from the dimmest, slow-burning dwarfs
to the hottest supergiants teetering on the edge of supernova extinction.

Now zoom in on one arm of the Milky Way. There's the sun, orange-yellow, about two-thirds out from
the center of the Galaxy. Lanes and folds of dust swaddle the sun out to distances of tens of thousands of