"Alastair Reynolds - Galactic North" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

his command -- he was King Monkey. But I've turned it off now."
"That's supposed to reassure me?"
"No, but maybe this will."
Mirsky tugged at the box, ripping it away from the side of her head in curds of blood.

LUYTEN 726-8 COMETARY HALO -- AD 2309

Irravel felt the Hirondelle turn like a compass needle. The ramscoops gasped at interstellar gas,
sucking lone atoms of cosmic hydrogen from cubic metres of vacuum. The engines spat twin beams
of thrust, pressing Irravel into her seat with two gees of acceleration. Hardly moving now, still in
the local frame of the cometary halo, but in only six months she would be nudging lightspeed.
Her seat floated on a boom in the middle of the dodecahedral bridge. "Map," Irravel said, and
was suddenly drowning in stars; an immense 30-light-year-wide projection of human settled space,
centred on the First System.
"There's the bastard," Mirsky said, pointing from her own hovering seat, her voice only slightly
strained under the gee-load. "Map; give us projection of the Hideyoshi's vector, and plot our
intercept."
The pirate ship's icon was still very close to Luyten 726-8; less than a tenth of a light-year out.
They had not seen Seven until now. The thrust from his ship was so tightly focused that it had taken
until now for the widening beams of the exhaust to sweep over Hirondelle's sensors. But now they
knew where he was headed. A dashed line indicated the likely course, arrowing right through the
map's heart and out towards the system Lalande 21185. Now came the intercept vector, a near-
tangent which sliced Seven's course beyond Sol.
"When does it happen?" Irravel said.
"Depends on how much attention Seven's paying to what's coming up behind him, for a start, and
what kind of evasive stunts he can pull."
"Most of my simulations predict an intercept between 2325 and 2330," Remontoire said.
Irravel savoured the dates. Even for someone trained to fly a starship between systems, they
sounded uncomfortably like the future.
"Are you sure it's him -- not just some other ship that happened to be waiting in the halo?"
"Trust me," Mirsky said. "I can smell the swine from here."
"She's right," Remontoire said. "The destination makes perfect sense. Seven was prohibited from
staying here much longer, once the number of missing ships became too large to be explained away
as accidents. Now he must seek a well-settled system to profit from what he has stolen."
The Conjoiner looked completely normal at first glance -- a bald man wearing a ship's uniform,
his expression placid -- but then one noticed the unnatural bulge of his skull, covered only in a fuzz
of baby hair. Most of his glial cells had been supplanted by machines which served the same
structural functions but which also performed specialized cybernetic duties, like interfacing with
other commune partners or external machinery. Even the organic neurones in his brain were now
webbed together by artificial connections which allowed transmission speeds of kilometres per
second; factors of ten faster than in normal brains. Only the problem of dispersing waste heat
denied the Conjoiners even faster modes of thought.
It was seven years since they'd woken him. Remontoire had not dealt well with the murder of his
three compatriots, but Irravel and Mirsky had managed to keep him sane by feeding input into the
glial machines, crudely simulating rapport with other commune members. "It provides the kind of
comfort to me that a ghost limb offers an amputee," Remontoire had said. "An illusion of wholeness
-- but no substitute for the real thing."
"What more can we do?" Irravel said.
"Return me to another commune with all speed."
Irravel had agreed, provided Remontoire helped with the ship.