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

light-years. Yet the sun itself is sitting right in the middle of a four-hundred-light-year-wide hole in the
dust, a bubble in which the density is about a twentieth of its average value.

That's the Local Bubble. It's as if God blew a hole in the dust just for us.

Except, of course, it wasn't God. It was a supernova, about a million years ago.

Look farther out, and there are more bubbles, their walls intersecting and merging, forming a vast
froth-like structure tens of thousands of light-years across. There are the structures of Loop I and Loop
II and the Lindblad Ring. There are even super-dense knots where the dust is almost too thick to be seen
through at all. Black cauls like the Taurus or Rho-Ophiuchi dark clouds or the Aquila Rift itself.

Lying outside the Local Bubble, the Rift is the farthest point in the galaxy we've ever traveled to. It's not a
question of endurance or nerve. There simply isn't a way to get beyond it, at least not within the
faster-than-light network of the aperture links. The rabbit-warren of possible routes just doesn't reach
any farther. Most destinations—including most of those on the Blue Goose's itinerary—didn't even get
you beyond the Local Bubble.

For us, it didn't matter. There's still a lot of commerce you can do within a hundred light-years of Earth.
But Schedar was right on the periphery of the Bubble, where dust density began to ramp up to normal
galactic levels, two hundred and twenty-eight light-years from Mother Earth.

Again: not good.

"I know this is a shock for you," another voice said. "But it's not as bad as you think it is."

I looked at the woman who had just spoken. Medium height, the kind of face they called "elfin," with
slanted ash-gray eyes and a bob of shoulder-length chrome-white hair.
The face hurtingly familiar.

"It isn't?"

"I wouldn't say so, Thom." She smiled. "After all, it's given us the chance to catch up on old times, hasn't
it?"

"Greta?" I asked, disbelievingly.

She nodded. "For my sins."

"My God. It is you, isn't it?"

"I wasn't sure you'd recognize me. Especially after all this time."

"You didn't have much trouble recognizing me."

"I didn't have to. The moment you popped out, we picked up your recovery transponder. Told us the
name of your ship, who owned her, who was flying it, what you were carrying, where you were
supposed to be headed. When I heard it was you, I made sure I was part of the reception team. But
don't worry. It's not like you've changed all that much."