"Alastair Reynolds - Minla's Flowers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

I told it to ease off on the wisecracks and start giving me the bad news. And it
most certainly was bad news. The precious syrinx was still func-tional—I touched it
and felt the familiar tremble that indicated it was still sensing the nearby Waynet—but
that was about the only flight-critical system that hadn’t been buckled or blown or
simply wiped out of existence by the unscheduled egress.

We were going to have to land and make repairs. For a few weeks or
months—however long it took the ship to scavenge and process the raw materials it
needed to fix itself—the search for my gun would be on hold.

That didn’t mean I was counting on a long stopover.

****

The ship still had a slow tumble. Merlin squinted against hard white glare as the
burning eye of a bright sun hove into view through the windows. It was white, but
not killingly so. Probably a mid-sequence star, maybe a late F or early G type. He
thought there was a hint of yellow. Had to be pretty close too.

“Tell me where we are.”

“It’s called Calliope,” Tyrant told him. “G-type. According to the last Cohort
census the system contained fifteen planet-class bodies. There were five terrestrials,
four of which were uninhabitable. The fifth—the farthest from Calliope—was
supposedly colonized by humans in the early Flourishing.”

Merlin glanced at the census data as it scrolled down the cabin wall. The
planet in question was called Lecythus. It was a typical watery terrestrial, like a
thousand others in his experience. It even had the almost-obligatory large single
moon.

“Been a while, ship. What are the chances of anyone still being down there?”

“Difficult to say. A later Cohort flyby failed to make contact with the
settlement, but that doesn’t mean no one was alive. After the emergence of the
Huskers, many planetary colonies went to great lengths to camouflage themselves
against the aliens.”
 “So there could still be a welcoming committee.”

“We’ll see. With your permission, I’ll use our remaining fuel to reach
Lecythus. This will take some time. Would you like to sleep?”

Merlin looked back at the coffinlike slab of the frostwatch cabinet. He could
skip over the days or weeks that it would take to reach the planet, but that would
mean subjecting himself to the intense unpleasantness of frostwatch revival. Merlin
had never taken kindly to being woken from normal sleep, let alone the deep
hibernation of frostwatch.

“Pass on that, I think. I’ve still got plenty of reading to catch up on.”