"Charles Stross - Escape" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"Breakthrough," says Parveen. The laser shut off, and she half- retracts her mirrors. Delicate work lies
ahead. She loads her comlaser and powers it up, then moves closer to the hole. It cools rapidly; no
damage. A thin blue radiance glitters inside the eggshell-thin aperture.

"Inbound candidates, range sixty seconds," says Raisa.

"Shit!" Lorma turns to face down the tunnel, foot-sensors already active and tracking the approach.

Parveen eases the laser probe in, stops at the first impact. "Looks standard." Behind her a brilliant
flicker-flash lights up the tunnel; from a great distance I hear Lorma scream -- whether from pain or
surprise is impossible to tell. "Cool handshake. Hey, this is a vanilla Dreamtime coupling! Totally standard
architecture! Big win! Big win!" The comlaser fills the world; the laser means everything. The circuits go
crazy with cheering. Chittering whirring mindlife closes in, examining the virtual space for prior
occupancy. For a moment she holds it in place: blue signals flicker in the corners of my visual field and I
suddenly realise I'm not on priority call any more, I can disconnect, and I'm just pulling out when she
ramps up the download, funnelling everything we can pull out of the Pascal Dreamtime

down the line into the hijacked starship's Dreamtime.

Everything goes black. And it stays that way when I open my eyes.

"Boris. Raisa. Anyone. Help." I'm scared. I'm blind. Childlike, I pull my hands to my face. Nothing!
Bowels like ice-water with fear. I can see absolutely nothing. Wisdom. No response -- just white noise
in the bottom left corner of my visual field, an array of fractal seashells exploding into the night. "Oh shit."
Hey, self-test -- my eyes blink green, red, blue, left-right up-down, flashing in test card patterns of
reassurance. Okay, everything works, I'm not blind. It's just gone very dark in here. I wonder why ...

Start. Reach up and touch your face. Feel the skin, tight, smooth, tense. Don't poke your eye by
accident, it hurts. The other hand, where is it? Ah, wrapped in a death-grip round a trailing
anchor strap. Reach out and touch it, touch somebody ... something hard. Ceiling, I guess. I reel
myself in like a fish on a line, bird on a wire, beggar girl in the streets trailing grubby finger along wall to
keep track. And there I am: one hand resting palm-down on the roof of the bridge, free fall, nothing
doing. Now stop and listen.

There's nothing to hear. No air vents whispering. No drone maintenance crew chittering. No creak and
ping of hull expanding and flexing in the interplanetary chill. A very faint breathing, a rasp like a sore
throat -- it will be sore, if its owner survives this unnerving night -- and the vacuous buzz of wisdom.
Which is wrong. Wisdom should be fully active all the time. Unless -- bandwidth conservation is in effect.
"Should have known better," I tell myself, subvocalising. "This is the window of vulnerability." The
vacuous buzz is a roar, a thunder like the end of the world: I've been screening it out, or I'd go mad.

Everything is pouring down the gatecoder channel, dinging into the dataspace inside the intruder at a
rate measured in millions of minds per minute. They got the protocol right, it's just an extended dreamtime
system with nanoforms glommed onto the base architecture like leeches. The ship didn'teven have a
caretaker AI. We must have been right about the Ultrabrights -- they don't like travelling alone. So the
attack ship is basically just another big dumb object, built to go fast and explode. We've conquered it,
like a pack of cannibal shrews pulling down a tiger. Now we're uploading everything we can into it,
draining Pascal's refugee Dreamtime into this mobile monstrosity, preparing to set course for another
solar system. But where is everyone? Why is it dark? I have a bad feeling about this.