"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space 04 - Absolution Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

going over things again, looking at all the components from the right
perspective, thinking outside the box. As a subpersona, that was exactly
what it was meant to do. If all it ever did was blindly forward every
anomaly that it couldn’t immediately explain, then the crew might as well
replace it with another dumb layer. Or, worse, upgrade it to something
cleverer.
It cleared the text message from the queen’s device and immediately
replaced it with the data she had been viewing just before.
It continued to gnaw away at the problem until, a minute or so later,
another anomaly bumped into its in-box. This time it was a thrust
imbalance, a niggling one-per-cent jitter in the starboard Conjoiner drive.
Faced with a bright new urgency, it chose to put the matter of the planet
on the back-burner. Even by the slow standards of shipboard
communications, a minute was a long time. With every further minute
that passed without the planet misbehaving, the whole vexing event would
inevitably drop to a diminished level of priority.
The subpersona would not forget about it—it was incapable of
forgetting about anything—but within an hour it would have a great many
other things to deal with instead.
Good. It was decided, then. The way to handle it was to pretend it had
never happened in the first place.
Thus it was that Queen Jasmina was informed of the sensor event
anomaly for only a fraction of a second. And thus it was that no human
members of the crew of the Gnostic Ascension—not Jasmina, not Grelier,
not Quaiche, nor any of the other Ultras—were ever aware that, for more
than half a second, the largest gas giant in the system they were
approaching, the system unimaginatively called 107 Piscium, had simply
ceased to exist.


Queen Jasmina heard the surgeon-general’s footsteps echoing towards
her, approaching along the metal-lined companionway that connected her
command chamber to the rest of the ship. As always, Grelier managed not
to sound in any particular hurry. Had she tested his loyalty by fawning
over Quaiche? she wondered. Perhaps. In which case it was probably time
to make Grelier feel valued again.
A flicker on the read-out screens of the skull caught her attention. For a
moment a line of text replaced the summaries she was paging
through—something about a sensor anomaly.
Queen Jasmina shook the skull. She had always been convinced that the
horrid thing was possessed, but increasingly it appeared to be going
senile, too. Had she been less superstitious, she would have thrown it
away, but dreadful things were rumoured to have happened to those who
ignored the skull’s counsel.
A polite knock sounded at the door.
“Enter, Grelier.”
The armoured door eased itself open. Grelier emerged into the
chamber, his eyes wide and showing a lot of white as they adjusted to the
chamber’s gloom. Grelier was a slim, neatly dressed little man with a
flat-topped shock of brilliant white hair. He had the flattened, minimalist